Former French right-wing president Nicolas Sarkozy was on Monday convicted on corruption charges, reported AFP. Ever since he left office in 2012 and lost his presidential immunity, Sarkozy faced a long list of probes into corruption and campaign financing violations. 

Sarkozy became the first French ex-president to stand trial on corruption charges in 2020 and was convicted of trying to bribe a judge with a plum retirement job in exchange for inside information on an enquiry into his campaign finances on Monday. He was sentenced to three years in prison including two years suspended.

Sarkozy’s former prime minister Francois Fillon was sentenced to five years in prison, three of them suspended, last year for orchestrating a fake job for his wife in a scandal that arguably cost him the presidency in 2017.

Fillon’s Welsh-born wife Penelope was given a suspended three-year sentence for participating in the scheme that saw her paid over one million euros in public funds over a 15-year period.

The couple was also ordered to pay fines of 375,000 euros ($423,000) each.

Former conservative president Jacques Chirac (1995-2007) became the first president to be convicted for graft in 2011 when he was given a two-year suspended sentence for siphoning off public money to pay people working for his political party while he was Paris mayor.

The ailing 79-year-old was too ill to attend his trial, nor did he appeal.

Prime minister under Chirac from 1995 to 1997, Juppe was sentenced in to a 14-month suspended jail term in 2004 in a separate scandal over fake jobs for members of his right-wing RPR party at Paris city hall between 1988 and 1995. He was also barred from public office for one year.

The European Court of Justice convicted Edith Cresson — France’s prime minister from 1991 to 1992 — for favouritism in 2006 for granting a job to a friend while she was a European Commissioner in Brussels in the late 1990s.