François and Penelope Fillon facing the judges

With Roger Martin

François Fillon is scheduled to appear before the Paris Criminal Court from Monday to March 11. The former Prime Minister of Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-2012) will have to answer for misappropriation of public funds by person charged with a mission of public service, complicity and concealment of this same offense, complicity and concealment of abuse of social goods and declaration falsehood to the High Authority for the transparency of public life (HATVP). He faces up to ten years in prison and a fine of 150,000 euros. His wife Penelope and his former deputy to the National Assembly, Marc Joulaud, are prosecuted to varying degrees for some of these crimes. All contest the charges against them.

Also read: The Hour of Truth by François Fillon

The case broke out on January 25, 2017. Mr. Fillon is then the LR candidate for the presidential election and everyone agrees that his chances of winning are real. But Le Canard enchaîné began publishing a series of devastating articles, claiming that he would have paid his wife for a fictitious parliamentary attaché job, between 1998 and 2002, then between 2012 and 2013. While François Fillon ceded his seat of deputy to his young substitute, Marc Joulaud, between 2002 and 2007, the latter would have "inherited" the fictitious contract and would even have gratified Mrs. Fillon of a substantial increase. Two of the couple's children are said to have participated, on a smaller scale, in imaginary missions of a senator's collaborator between 2005 and 2007, in order to add to their father's bank account. In total, prevention targets 1,171,400 euros of public funds fraudulently collected.

To this is added a supposed concealment of abuse of social goods (135,000 euros) from a job of Mrs. Fillon, qualified as fictitious, within La Revue des deux mondes , property of the businessman Marc Ladreit of Lacharrière. Finally, Mr. Fillon is accused of not having declared to the HATVP an advantageous loan of 50,000 euros made by Mr. de Lacharrière.

The National Financial Prosecutor's Office (PNF), created in 2013 in the wake of the Cahuzac scandal, seizes the revelations of the Duck chained with singular speed, since it opens a preliminary investigation the same day as the first publications of the weekly. A month later, faced with François Fillon's attacks calling into question the independence of the judiciary, judicial information was entrusted to judge Serge Tournaire, assisted by two colleagues. On March 14, 2017, two and a half months after the Duck's first salvo, François Fillon is indicted, a sequence that will make him say, as well as his entourage, that he is the target of a "political assassination" . Very weakened by the affair, he came third in the first round of the presidential election, on April 23, with 20.01% of the vote.

On the legal front, the defense endeavors to demonstrate that Penelope Fillon occupied the functions of parliamentary collaborator with her husband and then with Mr. Joulaud. Numerous documents are admitted, which the examining magistrates seem to have, contrary to what Mr. Fillon argued during a recent television program, conscientiously studied - evidenced by a 150-page order in which these documents are listed and analyzed. For the magistrates, this abundance of writings of various natures is intended to "make mass". It does not prove that Ms. Fillon worked for the interests of the National Assembly, where she never came from elsewhere.

The defense disputed the charges in an argued manner. For lawyers - Mes Antonin Levy (François Fillon), Pierre Cornut-Gentille (Penelope Fillon) and Jean Veil (Marc Joulaud) -, the specifics of the work of a parliamentary assistant mean that it is impossible to verify the reality according to classic criteria. The absence of a written record, in particular, cannot, according to them, be considered as proof of a fraudulent enterprise. They also point to problems of prescription and recall the principle of separation of powers, in the name of which the judicial authority would not be legitimate to assess the internal functioning of the legislative power.