PARIS: Former French prime minister Francois Fillon was on Tuesday given a four-year suspended prison sentence over a fake jobs scandal that wrecked his 2017 presidential bid.
Fillon, 71, had been found guilty in 2022 on appeal of embezzlement for providing a fake parliamentary assistant job to his wife, Penelope Fillon, that saw her being paid from public funds although the court found that she never did any work in the National Assembly.
The Paris appeals court also ordered him to pay a fine of 375,000 euros ($433,000) and barred him from seeking elected office for five years.
The sentence was milder than the one handed down in 2022, when he had been ordered to spend one year behind bars without any suspension.
But France’s highest appeals court, the Court of Cassation, overruled that decision and ordered a new sentencing trial.
No change was made to the punishment for Penelope Fillon, who is British, and who was handed a two-year suspended sentence and ordered to pay the same fine as her husband.
The couple has always insisted that Penelope Fillon had done genuine constituency work.
Neither was present in court for the sentencing.
Fillon, a conservative, earlier this year called the ban on seeking public office a “moral wound.”
The scandal, dubbed “PenelopeGate” by the French press, hurt Fillon’s popularity and contributed to his first-round elimination in France’s 2017 presidential election that was won by current President Emmanuel Macron.
“The treatment I received was somewhat unusual and nobody will convince me otherwise,” Fillon said. “Perhaps there was a link with me being a candidate in the presidential election.”
Sarkozy and Le Pen
Fillon claimed that fake parliamentary jobs were common between 1981 and 2021, saying that “a large majority” of lawmakers had been in a “perfectly similar situation” to his during that time.
His wife’s fake contract ran from 2012 to 2013.
“It is the appreciation of the court that there is no proof of any salaried work in the case,” the court said in its ruling.
Fillon’s lawyer, Antonin Levy, welcomed the decision to spare his client time in prison.
“Francois Fillon is a free man,” he said.
In another recent high-profile case involving French politicians, former president Nicolas Sarkozy, also a conservative, was stripped of his Legion d’Honneur distinction following his conviction for graft.
Sarkozy, 70, had been wearing an electronic ankle tag until last month after France’s highest appeals court upheld his conviction last December of trying to illegally secure favors from a judge.
Sarkozy is currently on trial in a separate case on charges of accepting illegal campaign financing in an alleged pact with late Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi.
Another case involves far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who was convicted in an embezzlement trial over fake European Parliament jobs, and is appealing the verdict.
As well as being given a partly suspended jail term and a fine, she was banned from taking part in elections for five years, which would — if confirmed — scupper her ambition of standing for the presidency in 2027.