French court to announce decision on prison sentence for former PM Fillon
French former Prime Minister Francois Fillon will on Monday learn whether an appeals court has upheld his conviction for setting his wife up with lucrative fake jobs in the French parliament. He has already been sentenced to five years in jail.
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Revelations about the scheme, under which Penelope Fillon was paid thousands of euros of state money for doing nothing, effectively torpedoed conservative Fillon's 2017 presidential campaign.
The 68-year-old was convicted by a lower court in 2020 and sentenced to five years in jail, three of them suspended.
At the appeals hearing last November, prosecutors said there was clear evidence that Fillon and his stand-in as MP for the Sarthe department, Marc Joulaud, employed Fillon's wife Penelope in an "intangible" or "tenuous" role as a parliamentary assistant between 1998 and 2013.
On top of jail time and fines, the Fillons and Joulaud were ordered to repay more than one million euros to France's National Assembly lower house.
The court also barred Fillon from holding public office for 10 years, while Penelope -- a serving local councillor -- received a two-year ban.
Appeal could lead to harsher penalty
Prosecutors have called for Fillon to face still harsher punishment in the appeals hearing, including five years' jail and a fine of 375,000 euros for abuse of public funds, collusion and concealing abuse of company assets.
They also want a two-year suspended sentence for Penelope Fillon and a fine of 100,000 euros.
Before the appeals court, the Fillons stuck to their defence that Penelope's "on-the-ground" work in Sarthe was "immaterial" but very "real".
Their lawyers attacked the "media frenzy" around "Penelopegate", as the scandal was dubbed when it emerged.
Neither of the accused is expected to be present in court on Monday.
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