Three people were charged* on Wednesday over a scandal relating to the funding of former French leader Nicolas Sarkozy's 2012 presidential campaign, reports The Daily Star in the Lebanon.
It was the first time charges had been pressed in the so-called Bygmalion affair and came only two weeks after Sarkozy made a triumphant return to front-line French politics.
The trio charged are all former employees of the PR firm Bygmalion, which organised events for Sarkozy's ultimately unsuccessful 2012 tilt at the Elysee Palace.
Guy Alvès and Bastien Millot, former Bygmalion directors, were charged with complicity in forgery and use of forged documents.
The third man, Franck Attal, former head of the events arm of Bygmalion, was charged with forgery and use of forged documents.
Bygmalion is accused of falsifying invoices for staging Sarkozy events, billing the conservative UMP party instead of the Sarkozy campaign.
The alleged fraud was supposedly carried out to circumvent strict campaign funding rules.
A lawyer for Alvès, Patrick Maisonneuve, told reporters that his client had told judges there was "a system put in place under which the UMP paid campaign fees in an irregular fashion".
According to a source close to the inquiry, the UMP picked up the tab for around 18.5 million euros ($23.3 million) in expenses that should have been billed to the Sarkozy campaign.
Read more of this AFP report published by The Daily Star in the Lebanon.
Read Mediapart's coverage of the affair here.
* Under a change to the French legal system introduced in 1993, a magistrate can decide a suspect should be 'placed under investigation' (mise en examen), which is a status one step short of being charged (inculpé), if there is 'serious or concordant' evidence that they committed a crime. Some English-language media describe this status, peculiar to French criminal law, as that of being charged. In fact, it is only at the end of an investigation that a decision can be made to bring charges, in which case the accused is automatically sent for trial.