French candidate Fillon’s legal woes mount as probe widened

Paris. French conservative presidential candidate Francois Fillon’s legal problems deepened on Tuesday, with financial prosecutors expanding a probe into payments to his family to suspected “aggravated fraud, forgery and use of forgeries”, a judicial source said.

Investigators are probing whether Fillon and his wife Penelope forged documents to try to justify around $757,000 she earned for a suspected fake job as a parliamentary assistant, the source said.

The news came as Socialist Interior Minister Bruno Le Roux resigned after revelations that he had hired his two teenage daughters as parliamentary aides, prompting comparisons to Fillon’s scandal.

France goes to the polls next month for the first round of a two-stage election to pick the next president. It has been a rollercoaster campaign, with a string of revelations that have knocked Fillon from the top of the opinion polls.

His wife Penelope and two of the couple’s children are suspected of holding fake jobs as parliamentary aides for which they were paid around 900,000 euros in total.

The conservative presidential candidate denies any wrongdoing, claiming to be the victim of an attempted “political assassination” and questioning the justice system’s impartiality.

The widened probe includes documents signed by Penelope Fillon bearing differing calculations of hours worked, the daily Le Monde reported.

Investigators are looking into whether “the calculations constitute forgeries made to justify, after the fact, the wages that were paid,” it said.

Penelope Fillon’s lawyer Pierre Cornut-Gentille firmly denied any attempt at forgery and denounced what he called a violation of confidentiality during the ongoing investigation.

French lawmakers are allowed to hire family members as assistants, as long as they do real work. (AFP)