A Paris court on Friday found France’s former intelligence chiefggsspg, Bernard Squarcini, guilty of using public resources to benefit the French luxury giant LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton in a trial that shed light on how the company sought to shield its public image for years.

Mr. Squarcini, who oversaw France’s spy agency from 2008 to 2012, was hired as a security consultant by LVMH upon leaving his government post. The court ruled that he had abused his power several times to assist the company. It gave him a four-year prison sentence, with two years under house arrest and two years suspended, and ordered him to pay a fine of 200,000 euros, or about 217,000 dollars. His lawyer said he would appeal the ruling.

Among other things, the court found Mr. Squarcini complicit in a bizarre illegal surveillance operation that LVMH conducted on François Ruffin, a gadfly French journalist who began making an unflattering documentary in 2012 about the company and its chief executive, the French billionaire Bernard Arnault.

Though the company was not among the defendants, the two-week trial took an unexpected turn in November when the head judge requested Mr. Arnault to testify as a witness.

In the packed Paris courtroom,9x999 cassino the corporate magnate portrayed himself as a successful business leader who had labored to turn LVMH into the world’s top luxury conglomerate, with 75 brands, including Louis Vuitton and Dior, and 200,000 employees worldwide. When Mr. Arnault first took over the company in the 1980s, it had just 10,000 employees.

He denied ever knowing of any illegal surveillance.

Mr. Squarcini was tried alongside nine other defendants — mostly civil servants, police officers and consultants. Two of them were found not guilty.

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For residents like Lateefat Rasaq, a civil servant living in Lagos with her husband and four children, the impact is frightening. “When it gets that hot, I often feel dizzy and faint,” she said. “I’m not just worried about myself — I fear for my children’s safety.”

In recent years, the rapid deployment of renewable energy and a shift away from the dirtiest fossil fuels has given even grizzled climate activists cause for some measure of hope.

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