Michel Mercier, 75, who served as minister for rural affairs and regional planning from 2009 to 2010 and as justice minister from 2010 to 2012, is accused of employing his wife and daughter and a phantom part-time parliamentary assistant for fake jobs paid out of parliamentary funds.
Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Rassemblement National party (the former front National), has claimed media revelations of a French police report into her party's alleged 6.8-million-euro fraud of the EU in a ficticious jobs scam was a plot against her by President Emmanuel Macron's camp ahead of next year's presidential elections.
Former French conservative prime minister François Fillon was on Monday handed a five-year prison sentence, with three years suspended, and his British wife Penelope was given a three-year suspended jail sentence, after a Paris court found the pair guilty of a scam in which Fillon paid his wife more than 800,000 euros as his parliamentary assistant for work she never did.
The much-trumpeted law to improve morality in public life and restore public confidence in the nation's elected representatives has passed its key hurdle in the French Parliament. The two key measures voted for by Members of the National Assembly were the ban on MPs employing members of their own family, and an obligation to produce receipts for expenses. After 50 hours of sometimes lively debate and 800 amendments, MPs voted overwhelmingly in favour – even if some on the Right called it an act of “masochism”. Mathilde Mathieu reports.
Like many of leading French politicians, François Fillon has his own 'micro' party which is used to develop policy ideas and raise funds. But Mediapart can reveal that the micro party run by Fillon, whose candidacy for the French presidency has been rocked by the so-called “fake jobs” scandal involving his wife Penelope, is discreetly banking donations from members of the public supporting his official electoral campaign. “It's madness!” says one senior figure on the Right. Mathilde Mathieu reports.
