A French appeals court has upheld former French Prime Minister Francois Fillon's conviction for setting his wife up with a job as a parliamentary assistant between 1998 and 2013, a local TV channel reported.
However, the court reduced his sentence to four years in prison with three suspended, which is down from the five years with three suspended when he was first convicted in 2020.
His wife Penelope has received a two-year suspended sentence, the report added.
In 2019, Francois Fillon, who was France's prime minister in 2007-2012, was first charged with embezzlement of state funds over giving fictitious jobs to his wife and two of his five children. The charges were brought following an investigation by French satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaine, which claimed in 2017 that Penelope Fillon was employed as her husband’s parliamentary assistant three times in the period spanning from 1988 to 2013.
Two of the couple’s children, Charles and Marie Fillon, were allegedly employed from 2005 to 2007 as assistants to their father, then a senator. According to the magazine, neither Penelope Fillon nor the children actually did their jobs, while fake employments earned the family a total of more than one million euros ($1.1 million). When the case was brought to court, on top of jail time and fines, the Fillons were ordered to repay more than one million euros ($1.055 million) to the lower house of France's National Assembly. Francois Fillon was also banned from holding public office for 10 years, while his wife received a two-year ban.