**A French trial in which a former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin is accused of plotting to discredit President Nicolas Sarkozy is to close.**Defence lawyers are to make their final arguments in the highly-charged case later, though a verdict is not expected for several months.
Mr de Villepin is charged with conspiring in 2004 to damage Mr Sarkozy’s presidential bid.
The former prime minister says the case is part of a vendetta against him.
Earlier this week prosecutors demanded an 18-month suspended sentence against Mr de Villepin, who has denied orchestrating any plot.
He had been facing up to a possible five-year prison sentence if convicted in the case.
At the time of the alleged conspiracy, Mr de Villepin and Mr Sarkozy were rivals vying to succeed then-President Jacques Chirac.
‘Failed to act’
Mr de Villepin is accused of having forged documents that wrongly implicated Mr Sarkozy in a major corruption scandal passed to a French magistrate.
It was alleged those named on the list had received bribes from international arms sales.
Mr Sarkozy, who claimed Mr de Villepin was the “primary instigator” behind the campaign to thwart his presidential bid, is one of 39 civil plaintiffs in the case.
In turn, Mr de Villepin testified last month that Mr Sarkozy had shown a “relentlessness to destroy a political adversary”.
Witnesses gave contradictory versions of events in three weeks of trial hearings, leaving 40 volumes of written evidence for judges to study, French news agency AFP reported.
Prosecutors argued that while Mr de Villepin had not deliberately taken part in the plot to defame Mr Sarkozy, he had failed to take action to stop the conspiracy and was an “accomplice through silence”.
They have also requested sentences for three other defendants.
The case, labelled by the French media as “the trial of the decade”, has been unfolding in the same Paris courtroom where Queen Marie Antoinette was sentenced to the guillotine in 1793 by France’s revolutionary tribunal.