AFP - A French court on Tuesday slapped prison terms and stiff fines on the leading figures in a high-level network that smuggled arms to Angola and included a former minister and a late president's son.

Russian-Israeli businessman Arkadi Gaydamak was sentenced in absentia to six years in prison at the trial which revealed a ring of corruption at the highest levels of Paris politics.

French trader Pierre Falcone was also sentenced to six years' jail, while French former interior minister Charles Pasqua was ordered jailed for a year and fined 100,000 euros (150,000 dollars).

The son of late French president Francois Mitterrand, Jean-Christophe Mitterrand, got a two-year suspended sentence and was fined 375,000 euros (550,000 dollars) for his role in the illegal arms sales in the 1990s.

The huge arsenal -- 420 tanks, 150,000 shells, 170,000 anti-personnel mines, 12 helicopters, six warships -- shored up President Eduardo Dos Santos's regime during its vicious bush war against UNITA rebels.

Angola pushed to have the trial abandoned, while French President Nicolas Sarkozy flew to Luanda in May 2008 to mend ties strained by the case.

The trial began in October 2008 and saw judges struggling to make sense of a labyrinth of murky deals linking French politicians, businessmen and public figures and a massive arms shipment to a war-torn African country.