Judges found former President Nicolas Sarkozy guilty of trying to bribe a judge and of influence-peddling on Monday and sentenced him to three years in jail, with two years suspended. Sarkozy, who led France from 2007 to 2012, had denied any wrongdoing, saying he was the victim of a witch-hunt by financial prosecutors who used excessive means to snoop on his affairs.

Retired from politics but still influential among conservatives, Sarkozy has 10 days to appeal the ruling.

He is the second former President in modern

France, after the late Jacques Chirac, to be convicted of corruption. Prosecutors persuaded the judges that Sarkozy had offered to secure a plum job in Monaco for judge Gilbert Azibert in return for confidential information about an inquiry into allegations that he had accepted illegal payments from L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt for his 2007 presidential campaign. This came to light, they said, while they were wiretapping conversations between Sarkozy and his lawyer Thierry Herzog after Sarkozy left office, in relation to another investigation into alleged Libyan financing of the same campaign.

Prosecutors told the court the 66-year-old should be jailed for four years and serve at least two. During his testimony, Sarkozy said he was the victim of lies and denied ever committing an act of corruption.

“Never. Never abused my influence, alleged or real,” he told the court in December. “What right do they have to drag me through the mud like this for six years? Is there no rule of law?”

Azibert, at the time a magistrate at France’s top appeals court for criminal cases and well-informed on the Bettencourt inquiry, did not get the job in Monaco.

Sarkozy’s predecessor, Jacques Chirac, is the only other President under France’s post-war Fifth Republic to have faced trial after leaving office.