Fillon setback as wife video resurfaces

The campaign of French presidential hopeful Francois Fillon has suffered a setback with a fresh revelation regarding alleged payments to his wife.

In a 2007 interview aired on television news on Thursday evening, Penelope Fillon explains: “I’ve never been actually [Francois’s] assistant or anything like that.”

It seems to contradict Mr Fillon’s claims that for years prior she did real work as his parliamentary aide. Mr Fillon denies wrongdoing. He says he is the victim of a left-wing plot to destroy him and the French right.

But he is facing growing pressure to pull out of the race for the presidency, with polls pointing to plummeting support for the man once deemed the favourite to win the election scheduled for April and May.

Prosecutors began investigating Mr Fillon over claims that payslips showed his wife earned €831,400 for years of work as a parliamentary assistant for her husband and his successor when he became a minister.

The couple have said she was legitimately employed as his parliamentary aide, and her lawyer, Pierre Cornut-Gentille, said she handed over evidence of the work she did.

But the claims of wrongdoing have mushroomed, with one economist Alain Minc dubbing the affair “a long shipwreck”.

On Thursday, the probe widened to include payments allegedly made to two of his children.

In the evening, a French TV channel also screened extracts from an interview with his Welsh-born wife in 2007 in which she told British media that she had never worked as his assistant.

Last October, Mrs Fillon told Le Bien Public newspaper: “Up to now, I have never been involved in the political life of my husband.”

The matter has thrown Mr Fillon’s Republicans Party into disarray, with some MPs urging Mr Fillon to make way in time for another right-wing candidate to fight the election.

On Friday, the senate president, the conservative Gerard Larcher, reaffirmed forced to tweet his backing: “I want to deny with firmness the extravagant allegations of the media: I confirm this morning my total support for @FrancoisFillon.”

Last week, Mr Larcher defended the payments to Mrs Fillon on the grounds that because women parliamentary aides earn more than men “this is one of the few cases where women get a better treatment than men”.

That response was mocked in the press and social media.