For all of you who aren't aware, the president of the republic enjoys partial legal immunity during his term and cannot be tried or arrested for most crimes excluding high treason.
While this theoretically exists to make sure the president does not get bogged down in legal procedures, it also means that in cases of people like Sarkozy or his predecessor Chirac, we get fraudsters who basically dodge the law for the entirety of their term (which can be technically infinite since there are no hard limits on how many terms you can achieve unlike the US).
Chirac in particular stayed president for 12 years and the legal procedure related to the fraud he committed only started when he was a senile 75 year old man.
