PARIS — A court on Thursday sentenced former French president Nicolas Sarkozy to five years in prison over a scheme for late Libyan dictator Moamer Kadhafi to fund his 2007 presidential run.

In a verdict that will make the rightwinger the first French postwar leader to serve jail time, the Paris criminal court convicted Sarkozy, 70, on criminal conspiracy charges.

However, it acquitted the former head of state, France’s president from 2007 to 2012, of corruption and personally accepting illegal campaign financing.

The court ordered that Sarkozy should be placed in custody at a later date, with prosecutors to inform him on October 13 when he should go to prison.

He was also fined 100,000 euros (RM495,000) and banned from holding public office. He has been convicted already in two separate trials but always avoided jail, in one case serving his graft sentence with an electronic tag, which has since been removed.

Sarkozy, who was present in court for the verdict accompanied by his model and musician wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy as well as his three sons, looked ashen-faced and shaken after the verdict.

But he vowed to appeal and his lawyer Christophe Ingrain later confirmed one had been filed.

The verdict was “extremely serious for the rule of law”, Sarkozy told reporters after leaving the courtroom, adding that he would “sleep in prison with my head held high”.

“This injustice is a scandal,” he said.

After her husband finished addressing reporters, Bruni-Sarkozy, in a sign of the family’s anger, snatched away the microphone muffler of the Mediapart news website which had published the first revelations on the case.

Sarkozy will have to serve his sentence while awaiting the outcome of his appeal.

He is to be the first French leader to be incarcerated since Philippe Petain, the Nazi collaborationist head of state of France’s Vichy regime, who was jailed after World War II.