The Fillon affair (also the Penelope Fillon affair or Penelopegate) is a political-financial scandal involving immediate family members of French politician François Fillon being given paid jobs that involved no or very little actual work. The case surfaced during the campaign for the 2017 French presidential election which Fillon, the candidate of the Republicans after winning the primary of the right and centre, was at the time strongly favoured to win.
The affair began when the 25 January 2017 edition of satirical weekly Le Canard enchaîné alleged that Penelope Fillon, wife of François Fillon, received €500,000 between 1998 and 2007 and in 2012 for a no-show job as a parliamentary assistant to first her husband and then his substitute Marc Joulaud. It also claimed that she was paid €100,000 as a literary adviser to the Revue des deux Mondes. The absence of evidence of work by Penelope Fillon and her distance from political life led the newspaper to suspect that these jobs were fictitious. The same day, the National Financial Prosecutor (Parquet national financier, or PNF) opened a preliminary investigation into embezzlement and misuse of public funds.
On 1 February, an article in the following issue of Le Canard enchaîné claimed that, including the years 1988 to 1990 and 2013, the total wages Penelope Fillon collected as a parliamentary assistant were in fact €813,440. In addition, the weekly revealed that two of the couple's children, Charles and Marie Fillon, received €84,000 while employed from 2005 to 2007 as assistants to their father, then a Senator.
On 17 February, François Fillon reneged on his previous promise that he would drop his bid if he was placed under formal investigation and announced he would maintain his candidacy regardless. On 14 March, he was placed under formal investigation for misuse of public funds, embezzlement, and failure to comply with transparency requirements. On 16 March the investigation was extended to "aggravated fraud, forgery, falsification of records" and influence-peddling, as investigators raised concerns that seized documents were forged in order to provide evidence of tangible work by Penelope Fillon.
After several years of investigations and a trial lasting almost six months, he was convicted on 20 June 2020. On 29 June 2020, Penelope was also convicted. François was sentenced to five years, while Penelope received a sentence of three years. They both appealed their sentences. The sentences were reduced to four years for François and two years for Penelope by a French appeals court on 9 May 2022.
Initial claims in Le Canard enchaîné (25–31 January 2017)
On 25 January 2017, the satirical weekly Le Canard enchaîné published an article alleging that Penelope Fillon, wife of François Fillon, was employed as a parliamentary assistant by her husband from 1998 and 2002 and for six months in 2012 with no evidence that she completed any substantial work, while collecting a monthly salary of €3,900 to €4,600. After her husband's appointment as Minister of Social Affairs in 2002 and later tenure as Minister of National Education, she served as a parliamentary aide to Marc Joulaud, Fillon's substitute, until 2007, earning a salary upwards of €7,900 during this period. In all, the article claimed that she received €500,000 as a parliamentary aide, in addition to €100,000 as a literary adviser to the Revue des deux Mondes, whose owner, businessman Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière, is a close friend of François Fillon. While deputies in the National Assembly are permitted to employ family members, those are still required to complete legitimate work. Le Canard cited Jeanne Robinson-Behre, an ex-parliamentary assistant to Joulaud who would have been expected to work with Penelope Fillon, as saying "I've never worked with her. [...] I knew her only as a minister's wife." Similarly, Christine Kelly, who penned a biography of François Fillon, asserted that she had "never heard that [Penelope] Fillon worked". The National Financial Prosecutor (PNF) initiated a preliminary investigation into possible embezzlement and misuse of public funds the same day.
On 26 January, François Fillon appeared on TF1 to respond to allegations of the fictitious employment of his wife, stating that she had "edited my speeches" and "stood in for me at events when I couldn’t be there", also claiming that the reason that she was never seen working in the Palais Bourbon was because "she was never on the front line." In the interview, he also disclosed that he paid two of his children while a Senator for the Sarthe between 2005 and 2007, claiming that he did so for work in their capacity as lawyers. He also pledged to resign if he was personally placed under investigation. However, on 27 January, it was revealed that both Marie and Charles Fillon were only law students when they were employed by their father during his stint in the Senate, contrary to his earlier statements. Police officers acting on behalf of the , responsible for the preliminary investigation into the affair, interrogated Fillon biographer Christine Kelly and former editor-in-chief of the Revue des deux Mondes Michel Crépu the same day, seeking to establish what work that Penelope Fillon had completed for the journal. Only "two or maybe three" bylines were attributed to her, Crépu said, also saying that he had seen "no trace" of any work by her that would "resemble [that of] a literary adviser". The HATVP authorized a raid of the offices of the review on 28 January as part of the preliminary investigation.
A report in the Journal du Dimanche on 29 January alleged that Fillon drew seven checks totaling €21,000 in public funds using a known legal mechanism while Senator for the Sarthe. In an interview with the paper published in the same issue, he stated that he was a victim of slander, denouncing the accusations leveled at him as a "gross manipulation". Fillon and his spouse were questioned for five hours by police of the OCLCIFF the following day, reportedly in order to assist authorities in their determination of the nature of Penelope Fillon's work. Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière, president of Revue des deux Mondes, was also separately interrogated in connection with the investigation of fictitious employment. This was succeeded by a subsequent search on the floor of the National Assembly on 31 January, seeking employment contracts for Penelope Fillon, who claimed that she no longer had them; it was later reported that she claimed that she did not remember if she even signed such contracts during questioning by investigators. Le Parisien revealed in a piece published the same day that she had neither a parliament badge nor an email address during the period she supposedly served as a parliamentary assistant. Though Antonin Lévy, Fillon's lawyer, maintained that many aides did not have a badge and most lacked an email address, most working in the Palais Bourbon have a badge, and to lack one was extremely uncommon in practice.
Additional sums revealed (1–8 February)
On 1 February, a week after its initial report, Le Canard enchaîné published revelations that the total sum received by Penelope Fillon in fictitious jobs apparently totaled more than €930,000; with the addition of the period from 1988 to 1990 and 2013, her income as a parliamentary assistant now totaled €831,440. In addition, the satirical weekly also revealed that the payments to two of Fillon's children reached nearly €84,000, with €57,084 net for Marie Fillon and €26,651 for Charles Fillon. In a closed-door meeting at his campaign headquarters with Republican parliamentarians the same day, he denounced "an institutional coup d'état" of "the left" and requested that they "hold on for 15 days" to let the inquiry run its course. In addition, Marc Joulaud, substitute of Fillon in the National Assembly who succeeded him as deputy, testified before investigators in the afternoon to describe the character of Penelope Fillon's work. Increasingly anxious LR deputies, headed by former judge Georges Fenech, expressed concerns about the continued candidacy of Fillon, with some speculating that he could be replaced on the ticket by Alain Juppé, who came second in the primary of the right. L'Obs managed to procure the missing employment contracts of Penelope Fillon, revealing that she was supposedly based at the Le Mans offices of Fillon's RPR party. However, local party activists contacted by the publication indicated that, even there, they had never seen her work. The document, however, contained two addresses: a full address in Le Mans and the town of Sablé-sur-Sarthe, but without any address within the town; in response to the story, Lévy claimed this the discrepancy occurred because "somebody added an address", affirming that Sablé-sur-Sarthe was the actual location of her employment.
Video excerpts of a May 2007 Sunday Telegraph interview with Penelope Fillon surfaced on 2 February in which she claimed that she had "never been his assistant," referring to her husband. The footage aired on Envoyé spécial on France 2 that evening, and was received by a record audience of 5.4 million viewers. The PNF expanded investigation into the fictitious employment affair to include Fillon's two eldest children the same day to verify the veracity of their work, after Le Canard reported that neither Marie nor Charles Fillon were lawyers at the time their father served in the Senate. The following morning, officers acting for the PNF and authorized by Gérard Larcher retrieved documents relating to their positions and terms of the pair's employment from the Senate. In a video posted on social networks in the afternoon, François Fillon insisted that he would maintain his candidacy and called on his supporters to "hold the line", seeking to assuage worries from within his own camp about the maintenance of his candidacy.
On 6 February, Fillon held a press conference at his campaign headquarters at which he "apologized to the French people" and acknowledged that he had committed an "error" in employing family members as parliamentary assistants, but appended that he "never broke the law". He also confirmed that his wife was employed as a parliamentary assistant for 15 years with an average monthly salary of €3,677, and argued that "her salary was perfectly justified because her activities were indispensable to my activities as an elected official", adding that everything reported by the press on the issue was "legal and transparent". He said he would not reimburse the payments received by his wife or children, and, saying that he had "nothing to hide", divulged his property holdings. Furthermore, he also contended that British journalist Kim Willsher, who interviewed his wife for the Sunday Telegraph, was "shocked" by the usage of the excerpt on France 2; soon after Fillon's statement, Willsher denied that the interview was taken out of context. In addition to promising that his lawyers would question the competency of the PNF to carry out the investigation, he lambasted a "media lynching" of his campaign. Noting that there was no "plan B" for the Republicans (LR), and having received millions of votes in the primary of the right, he vowed to maintain his bid for the presidency. His remarks followed Juppé's declaration that "NO means NO" earlier in the day in response to rumors that he might replace Fillon as the party's candidate should he decide to drop his bid.