"All of us have to anticipate occasionally there are going to be breaches like this.
It is safer to assume that there will be breaches, and work out how to minimise the damage.
Nine were found to be breaches; 36 were not breaches; 13 were resolved, and 113 were not considered.
"On basis of what we have seen so far there may be breaches of the antitrust rules because of the very extensive scope of these agreements," said Jonathan Todd, a spokesman for the European Union competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes.
As Dr Stephen Coleman, director of the e-democracy programme at the Hansard Society, warns: "The big issue of the election after this will be breaches of campaign spending.
In what would be breaches of European treaties, Mr. Sarkozy threatened last week to pull France out of the Schengen zone of passport-free travel in Europe and to erect unilateral trade barriers unless he got his way on stricter controls on migrants and on unfair competition in public procurement.
