A sentence of four years in prison with suspended suspended Against the former Minister François Fillon in the case of fictitious jobs of his wife Penelope. The Advocate General also requested against the former presidential candidate of 2017 a fine of 375,000 euros and 10 years of ineligibility, but his requisitions dismiss the firm part of one year which had been pronounced on May 9, 2022 by the Paris Court of Appeal.
At the end of the hearing, which continued in the afternoon with the defense arguments, the decision should be rendered on a later date.
François Fillon, 71, has been since April 2024 definitively guilty in particular the embezzlement of public funds, but the Court of Cassation ordered a new hearing dedicated only to painin this case which has leafy for months and stopped its race in mind for the presidential election.
Back on Tuesday before the Paris Court of Appeal, François Fillon spoke of the “moral injury” that represents for him the penalty of ineligibility which had been pronounced against him, although he does not feed any project of return to politics. “No one will take it from my head that I was treated in a somewhat special way”, which has “perhaps something to do with the fact that I was a candidate in the presidential election,” he said at the helm.
“Make money”
The case had broken out in January 2017 with the revelations of the chained duck, starting for François Fillon an endless political and media ordeal, and a campaign in which the noise of pans and “returned the money” against the one who was then a candidate of the right and the center.
Launched on the track Penelope Fillon jobsthe investigators heard from the gardener to local journalists, including former collaborators and prefects stationed at the time, without hardly finding testimonies establishing the reality of the wife’s work of the one who has long landed in herald of integrity. It will be eliminated in the first round of the presidential election, arriving in third position with 20.01 % of the votes, unprecedented situation for a right -wing candidate under the Fifth Republic.
His wife definitively condemned
And apple, the 9 out of 2022the former head of government was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment, including a firm year, 375,000 euros fine and 10 years of ineligibility for embezzlement of public funds, complicity in abuse of corporate goods, concealments. His wife, Penelope Fillon, had been sentenced to two years suspended prison sentence, as well as 375,000 euros fine, and his ex-suppleant, Marc Joulaud, to three years in suspended prison, with respective ineligibility of two and five years. The three defendants had also been sentenced to pay a total of around 800,000 euros in damages to the National Assembly.
If she rejected the appeals of Penelope Fillon and Marc Joulaud making their definitive sorrows, the Court of Cassation, whose task is to rule on the background of the file but on the right application of the law, said that the court of appeal had not sufficiently motivated the firm part of the sentence pronounced against François Fillon.
In addition, the high court had judged that the amount of 126,167 euros, granted to the National Assembly in damages for the parnoon assistant contract of Penelope Fillon with her husband in 2012-2013, had been poorly assessed, insofar as the court of appeal had recognized that Penelope Fillon had still carried out certain tasks. Other damages are definitively due by the couple.
Targeted by another survey opened in 2017 for embezzlement of public funds, François Fillon had accepted to reimburse nearly 70,000 euroscorresponding to the salary and social contributions of an ex-parliamentary assistant, the writer and philosopher Maël Renouard, who had contributed to the writing of one of his books. Due to this regularization, the national financial prosecutor’s office had undoubtedly classified this preliminary investigation.
