French ex-PM gets 5 year sentence in fraud trial
GUILTY
Former French prime minister Francois Fillon (right) and his wife Penelope Fillon (2nd from right) leave the Paris’ courthouse on June 29, 2020 after a ruling on a trial for embezzlement in the context of an alleged job fraud.
PARIS: A Paris court on Monday sentenced former French prime minister Francois Fillon to five years in prison, with three suspended, after finding him guilty of orchestrating a fake job for his wife, a scandal that cost him his shot at the presidency in 2017.
Fillon’s wife Penelope was handed a suspended three-year sentence for participating in a scheme that saw her paid over a million euros in public funds over a 15-year period.
Both were ordered to pay fines of 375,000 euros ($ 423,000) and also reimburse one million euros to the National Assembly, where Penelope supposedly worked as Fillon’s parliamentary assistant from 1998 to 2013.
With three years of the five years suspended, Fillon faces two years behind bars in jail. But the couple immediately appealed the ruling, meaning neither will be detained for now pending the appeal.
The couple made no statements as they left the courthouse.
The case was widely seen as a test of whether French politicians would be held to account after decades of getting off lightly on charges of nepotism or financial misconduct.
Test for French elite
The allegations that Fillon had pilfered the public coffers for years pummeled his image as an upright fiscal hawk promising to right the country’s finances — and loomed large in the
“yellow vest” anti-government protests that rocked the country in 2018-2019.
A newspaper report on the fake job surfaced early in January 2017, just after Fillon clinched the nomination from his rightwing Republicans party as candidate for a presidential race he was widely tipped to win.
It later emerged that Fillon had also used public money to pay two of his children a combined 117,000 euros for alleged sham work while he was a senator, before becoming premier in the government of then- president Nicolas Sarkozy.
He was also accused of getting the millionaire owner of a literary magazine to pay his wife 135,000 euros for “consulting work” that was largely fake.
A third defendant, Marc Joulaud — who stood in for Fillon in parliament when he was a cabinet minister, and who also hired Penelope Fillon as an assistant — was also found guilty.
He was also handed a three year suspended sentence.
Fillon’s lawyers had attempted to have the case reopened after the former head of the Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF), Eliane Houlette, told lawmakers this month that she had met with “pressure” to bring charges quickly against Fillon.
But the court rejected the request Monday, even though President Emmanuel Macron — whose path to the presidency was cleared by Fillon’s downfall — requested an investigation over the prosecutor’s claims.
said last week that they had spotted small amounts of radioactive isotopes in parts of Finland, southern Scandinavia and the Arctic. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s ( IAEA) director general, Rafael Grossi, said in a statement late Monday that “the levels reported to the IAEA are very low and pose no risk to human health and the environment.” The agency contacted European countries on Saturday to request information. It said that, by Monday afternoon, 29 had voluntarily reported that nothing had happened on their territory that might have caused the concentrations of isotopes in the air. A few countries outside Europe reported similar findings. Russia wasn’t on the list of countries that had reported back to the IAEA by Monday.