PARIS, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Legal troubles of French rightwing presidential candidate Francois Fillon continue as his wife Penelope Fillon on Tuesday night was also put under formal investigation in relation to an alleged fake jobs scheme.
With less than a month before the first round of voting, the former prime minister, once the favorite for the French presidency, will be hard-pressed to be able to re-launch his campaign.
WORK QUESTIONS
Following a long session of questioning in the financial center of the grand tribunal of Paris, Penelope was placed under investigation Tuesday night for "complicity and misuse of public funds, complicity and misuse of company assets, and aggravated fraud," according to a judiciary source. The judges had not included a charge of forgery in the summons delivered to Penelope Fillon, the source added.
Her lawyer, Pierre Cornut-Gentille, tried to launch a counter-attack in the press. "While this affair will be examined in the serenity and respect for the principles of law, I maintain that the innocence of Penelope and Francois Fillon will be recognized," he affirmed.
He repeated the line of defense adopted by the Fillon camp since the breaking of the "PenelopeGate" scandal, arguing that "the magistrates decided to put Penelope Fillon under investigation, in a biased logic of investigation and preliminary inquiry, to the detriment of the separation of powers and the presumption of innocence, with an abnormal rapidity."
The spouse of the candidate for the Republicans is suspected to have benefited from a fake job paid with public money from the French National Assembly from 1986 to 2013 during which she received 680,380 euros (732,065 U.S. dollars) net, or close to 3,600 euros a month on average.
LEGAL CHARGES
The magistrates, selected by the National Financial Courts at the end of February, must determine if Penelope Fillon really worked during the period in which she was employed as a parliamentary assistant by her husband, then by his deputy Marc Joulaud.
This is the third person placed under formal investigation in the affair, after Francois Fillon on March 14, and his former deputy Joulaud on March 24.
According to the daily newspaper Le Monde, Penelope Fillon gave some clarifications on the nature of her work for her spouse during her questioning by judicial police. "I filled out forms for him. It happened that I represented him at cultural events," she notably declared.
In the newspaper columns of the Journal du Dimanche, she also affirmed three days ago that she took care of "the mail arriving at their residence," the "demands of citizens, personal problems of people in difficulty, various solicitations."
The suspicions of fictitious employment also weigh on the work of Penelope Fillon between May 2012 and December 2013, when she was paid 5,000 euros gross a month while supposedly writing for the Revue des Deux Mondes, a literary magazine owned by a rich businessman friend of her husband.
Since the breaking of the "PenelopeGate" scandal at the end of January, Francois Fillon has dived in opinion polls on the first round of voting in the presidential election scheduled for April 23. He has since been cleanly left behind by extreme-right candidate Marine Le Pen and centrist Emmanuel Macron, the former economy minister under sitting President Francois Hollande, and founder of the "En Marche!" political movement.
SOURING CAMPAIGN CLIMATE
His formal investigation, a first for a major presidential candidate in the history of the French Fifth Republic, provoked a veritable outcry across the nation exacerbated by the fact that the former prime minister under Nicolas Sarkozy had made personal integrity the central axis of his campaign.
Francois Fillon says he is the victim of a "conspiracy," which aims block the right wing from taking the presidency. He has not hesitated to overtly accuse President Hollande and to evoke the existence of a "secret operation." But his line of defense is not convincing those beyond his core supporters.
The head of state has strongly condemned the "deceitful allegations" of the candidate for the Republicans, denouncing "an intolerable turmoil" in the presidential campaign, and affirming that, since his election in 2012, "the executive has never intervened in any judicial case and has always strictly respected the independence of the courts."
Never has the climate of the French presidential campaign been so deleterious. To "PenelopeGate" has been added other scandals, notably involving the extreme-right candidate Marine Le Pen regarding another fake jobs accusation at the European Parliament and suspected illegal campaign financing.
The socialist Minister of the Interior Bruno Le Roux was forced to resign last week following revelations regarding the employment of his daughters as parliamentary assistants.
From here until April 23, however, the French could still find themselves victims of more surprises.
