PARIS: A French appeals court on Monday upheld a conviction against former right-wing prime minister Francois Fillon for providing a fake parliamentary assistant job to his wife that saw her paid hundreds of thousands of euros in public funds.
The "Penelopegate" scandal, revealed in a media report while he was the front-runner in the 2017 presidential race, torpedoed his political career and cleared a path for then-relatively unknown Emmanuel Macron to win the race.
Fillon, a hard-nosed fiscal conservative, angrily denied the claim and insisted that his wife Penelope Fillon had done genuine constituency work while he was an MP for the western Sarthe department.
But prosecutors insisted there was scant record of any actual work and noted she had rarely joined her husband at the lower-house National Assembly, which was a civil plaintiff in the case.
The court trimmed Fillon's sentence to four years in prison with three suspended -- down from five years with three suspended when he was first found guilty in 2020.
Penelope Fillon was given a suspended two-year prison sentence for the embezzlement and complicity in misuse of public funds charges, down from three years suspended, but the court maintained fines of €375,000 for each of them.
They were also ordered to repay $845,000 to the National Assembly, which reimbursed Penelope for the job as Fillon's assistant.
Under French sentencing guidelines, it is unlikely that Fillon will spend any time behind bars, and can be ordered instead to wear an ankle-bracelet. The couple was not in court for the verdict, and their defence team said in a statement afterwards that they would lodge a further appeal with France's supreme court.
At the November appeals hearings, prosecutors said there was clear evidence that Fillon and his stand-in as MP for the Sarthe department, Marc Joulaud, employed Fillon's wife Penelope in an "intangible" or "tenuous" role as a parliamentary assistant between 1998 and 2013.
The court also upheld on Monday the original three-year suspended sentence for Joulaud. Fillon, now 68, was widely tipped to win the 2017 presidency race when the Canard Enchaine newspaper reported that Penelope had been his parliamentary assistant for 15 years, earning some one million euros over the period.
It later emerged that Fillon also used public money to pay two of his children a combined 117,000 euros for allegedly sham work while he was a senator, before he became premier in the government of president Nicolas Sarkozy from 2007 to 2012.
On Monday the court reduced the conviction on that charge.
But he was again convicted in a third fraud case, of getting the millionaire owner of a literary magazine to pay his wife 135,000 euros for "consulting work" that was largely fake. - AFP
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