Former French prime minister François Fillon was given a four-year suspended prison sentence over his wife’s fake jobs scandal, which torpedoed his 2017 presidential bid.
He was also ordered him to pay a fine of €375,000 and was barred from seeking elected office for five years.
Fillon, 71, had been found guilty in 2022 on appeal of embezzlement for providing a fake parliamentary assistant job to his wife, Penelope Fillon, that saw her being paid millions of euros in public funds.
The sentence passed on June 17 was milder than the one handed down in 2022.
On May 9, 2022, he was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment and a 10 year ban on standing for office.
But France’s highest appeals court, the Court of Cassation, overturned that decision, ruling in particular that the prison sentence was insufficiently justified and ordered a new sentencing trial.
The slogan that haunted Fillon’s 2017 presidential campaign, “Fillon, give back the money!”, has taken on renewed relevance as his lawyer confirmed that his client would reimburse the full amount in question.
“This decision restores perspective to this case after several years. There is no prison sentence, no electronic monitoring — François Fillon is a free man,” said his lawyer, Antonin Lévy. He added that he would review the ruling before deciding whether to file a further appeal.
“We demonstrated that work had indeed been carried out. In the end, it was acknowledged that while Madame Fillon’s work was insufficient, it did not constitute a fictitious job,” Lévy concluded.
The former prime minister suggested the case was politically motivated.
“No one can deny that I was treated in a rather unusual way,” he said in April 2025, hinting that this may have been linked to his candidacy in the presidential election.
He also argued that, between 1981 and 2021, “a vast majority of MPs” had been in circumstances “very similar” to his own.
