Paris (AFP) – A scandal surrounding French presidential hopeful Francois Fillon deepened on Tuesday with allegations that he obtained jobs for his children as well as his wife that paid around one million euros.
The fresh allegations in the Canard Enchaine came as investigators raided parliament and seized documents as part of a preliminary probe into a first set of charges levelled against the conservative candidate by the weekly paper last week.
In its issue to appear Wednesday, the Canard — which mixes satire with investigative reporting — alleged it had unearthed seven additional years during which Penelope Fillon was paid as a parliamentary aide out of public funds available to MPs, nicknaming her “Miss Moneypenny”.
The paper last week alleged that it could find no witnesses to work that earned Penelope around 500,000 euros ($560,000) over eight years from 1998 to 2007.
The new allegations bring to more than 830,000 euros she allegedly made as an aide.
Fillon angrily dismissed the original claims last week, saying his wife had “always” worked for him, doing tasks such as editing his speeches and meeting people in his constituency.
In addition, Welsh-born Penelope worked at a literary review owned by a billionaire friend of her husband’s where she allegedly earned another 100,000 euros.
Another 84,000 euros in public funds was paid to two of the couple’s five children, son Charles and daughter Marie, as parliamentary aides, the report alleged.
The couple were quizzed separately by investigators for several hours on Monday.
Lawmakers are entitled to employ family members, and it is a common practice in many countries but questions have focused on what work was actually done.
Sources close to the investigation said that Fillon’s staff had voluntarily handed over documents in the raid on Tuesday.
The legal woes of the 62-year-old Fillon, for weeks the frontrunner in the presidential race campaigning on his “clean” record, is the latest twist in a rollercoaster election that has seen voters hungry for change dump several political heavyweights.
The former prime minister swept past scandal-tainted ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy and ex-premier Alain Juppe in November’s Republicans primary.
But Fillon’s popularity has dropped since the allegations first emerged.
An opinion poll published on Sunday showed that Marine Le Pen, the leader of the anti-immigration and anti-EU National Front (FN), would score highest in the first round of the election on April 23, followed by Fillon and the centrist Emmanuel Macron almost neck-and-neck.
– Fillon claims ‘dirty tricks’ –
Conservatives were also won over by Fillon’s promise to slash 500,000 civil service jobs, cut benefits and increase working time.
But he goes into the last three months of the race damaged by the Canard Enchaine’s allegations.
Fillon has insisted that his wife, also 62, played a real, if discreet, role and that he is the victim of a dirty tricks campaign.
He says that when he was an MP in Paris his wife did a lot of constituency work but was based at their 12th-century chateau near Le Mans in northern France.
Penelope, who has not spoken publicly about the accusations, has always styled herself as a low-key political wife.
A trained lawyer, she told Britain’s Sunday Telegraph newspaper after her husband became prime minister in 2007 that she preferred staying at home than in glitzy Paris.
“I’m just a country peasant, this is not my natural habitat,” she joked.
The Republicans group in the French parliament on Monday expressed complete support for their candidate.
“He has the unanimous support of the lawmakers,” said the party’s leader in the lower house, Christian Jacob.
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