Le Figaro Marseille
“
Hubert Falco
was a good mayor,”
recognizes the general advocate.
It is very good.
Let him be thanked for that.
It is not up to me to do it but to the citizens.
But today, we are saying that he also failed in his duty of probity and as a person holding public authority.”
In the room of the Aix-en-Provence Court of Appeal, the former minister listens to Régine Roux's implacable indictment, his gaze downcast and dejected, his head in his hands.
The Advocate General requested the same sentence for him as at first instance, also confirming that he wished to maintain his ineligibility.
On April 14, Hubert Falco was sentenced to three years in prison and five years of ineligibility for continuing to eat free lunch for years in the cafeteria of the Var departmental council, when he was no longer there. president for more than ten years, and to have benefited from meals on wheels and dry cleaning costs at the taxpayer's expense.
The “Baron of Var” deprived of political life
This affair of embezzlement of public funds went down in history as that of the “Falco fridge”, because these meals were stored in a special refrigerator.
At the opening of his appeal trial on Monday, the former minister admitted to having committed a “mistake” by eating free lunch at the departmental council canteen
“once or twice a week”
.
According to investigators, private meals, served even on weekends to Hubert Falco and his wife, an employee of the departmental council, would have cost the taxpayer at least 64,500 euros between 2015 and 2018.
The sentence at first instance had immediate application, forcing the man whom a lawyer for the civil party nicknamed
“the Baron of Var”
to renounce his mandates as mayor of Toulon and within the metropolitan council.
Hubert Falco has never hidden his desire to return to political life, his lawyer even indicating to Le
Figaro
that in this trial, his client
was “gambling his life.”
Upon hearing these requisitions, his council requested a recess of the hearing, before the former mayor discreetly slipped out a back door.