British businessman appeals French sentence

British businessman Ian Griffin told a French appeals court Monday that he did not intend to kill his Polish-born girlfriend in a luxury hotel in Paris in 2009.

Ian Griffin in Paris in December 2014 AFP/Mattheu AlexandreE

Griffin, 46, said he contested the guilty verdict reached in December 2014, for which he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

"It's the intention that I contest," he said through an interpreter at the court in the southern Paris suburb of Evry.

Griffin has been confined to a wheelchair since contracting a serious neurological illness in jail.

Kinga Wolf, 36, was found dead in the room in Le Bristol hotel with her skull, jaw and larynx smashed and more than 100 marks on her body.

The lower court ruled that Griffin was responsible for his actions.

The prosecution described Griffin as a "gigolo" who had no visible source of income but lived off his wealthy girlfriends, such as Wolf, who owned an international company that supplied tomatoes to supermarkets.

The Briton had claimed he and Wolf had had a ferocious row over dinner at a chic restaurant in the French capital after she refused him the anti-depression pills to which he had become addicted.