Fillon furious over new corruption allegations as he slips in polls
CONSERVATIVE French presidential candidate François Fillon angrily dismissed a fresh report yesterday alleging that he put his British wife on the public payroll in 1982, four years earlier than he claimed.
“I won’t say another word about these things,” the centre-Right contender said, criticising “successive revelations, carefully disseminated by state services”.
The revelation comes as polls see Mr Fillon challenged for his current third place in the contest by Communist revolutionary Jean-Luc Mélenchon, with one survey putting Mr Mélenchon ahead of him as French voters prepare to cast their first ballots in the two-stage presidential race on April 23.
But the polls also suggest that he and Mr Mélenchon, both on 18-19 per cent, are only four to six percentage points behind frontrunners, independent centrist Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, the far-Right Front National leader.
“It’s too close to call,” Vincent Chriqui, Mr Fillon’s campaign director, told The Daily Telegraph and other English-speaking reporters yesterday, insisting that the record numbers of undecided voters – around 40 per cent – meant everything was still to play for. Mr Fillon, once the race’s frontrunner, was charged with abuse of public funds last month. Denying wrongdoing, he has blamed the outgoing Socialist government for the scandal and called for an inquiry into dirty tricks.
The 63-year-old is accused of giving fake jobs to his Welsh-born wife Penelope that earned her €680,000 (£580,000) in salary payments between 1986 and 2013. But Mediapart, the investigative website, said: “Penelope Fillon in fact benefited from public funds from the first parliamentary mandate of her husband through contracts for studies or projects that he commissioned.”
Other sleaze accusations have piled up since the scandal first broke in January. The Republicans candidate has acknowledged receiving tens of thousands of euros in tax-free loans, includ- ing one from his daughter, and receiving gifts of watches from businessmen worth €27,000 and bespoke suits costing €13,000.
Mr Fillon’s lawyer Antonin Levy confirmed that investigators seized “contracts for studies” during a raid of the candidate’s parliamentary offices in late January but said they were of “no interest” to the probe which he said reaches back only to 1997.