The edition of Duck chained of Wednesday January 25, 2017 will derail François Fillon’s campaign for the presidential election. The weekly publishes an investigation which began weeks earlier but which the winner of the right and center primary did not take seriously. The day before, he shared a galette des rois with his team. And that day, the bean turns out to be… a black cat! “After the cut cake, when I take my phone back in my pocket, I see 177 text messages from journalists trying to reach us, and me in particular, on the dispatch that has just fallen to AFP which says that Le Canard enchaîné pin François Fillon and Madame on the Penelope affair which will become the ‘Penelopegate’ “, recalls Thierry Solère, organizer of the primary, to the magazine “1:15 p.m. on Sunday” (replay).
His wife is said to have benefited from a fictitious job as a parliamentary assistant. The candidate of the right discovers the extent of these revelations without knowing yet that they will sink his campaign. “I thought it was a joke. This Tuesday evening, a journalist asks me if I read Le Canard enchaîné which appears the next day. He tells me and I said: ‘You are making fun of me, that’ is not possible ‘”, tells Gérard Frétellière, opponent of François Fillon in Sablé-sur-Sarthe. Georges Fenech, former deputy for Les Républicains, reports: “Everyone on the right falls out of the closet, first of all because we know that The Chained Duck doesn’t go out of business like that without having checked. So there is bound to be some truth to it …”
“At Sablé, everyone knew very well that Madame Fillon never worked for her husband”
Louis-Marie Moreau, former editor-in-chief of the “Journal satirique appearing on Wednesdays”, explains: “We discover that, very strangely, his wife has an income. And we noticed that she had the functions of collaborating with her husband as parliamentary attaché during the entire period he was a parliamentarian, and which is very long … “ Between 1998 and 2007, Penelope Fillon was paid as an assistant to her husband in the National Assembly, then to her deputy Marc Soulaud between 2002 and 2007, while her husband became a minister. That is to say a total of 500,000 euros in remuneration. The weekly writes that it has not found much evidence of this activity. “Everyone fell from the top, 100%, at Sablé, because everyone knew very well that Madame Fillon never worked for her husband”, says Gérard Frétellière.
Arnaud de Montlaur, a friend of François Fillon: “Me, that does not surprise me more than that. It is besides her who made me indirectly enter this campaign. It is with her that I prepared a lot of things for years, therefore, me , it doesn’t shock me actually this story. “ Another suspicion, Penelope Fillon would have benefited from a second fictitious job at the Review of two worlds, owned by Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière, the billionaire friend of François Fillon. And this is the second part of the explosive revelations of the weekly … On June 29, 2020, the Paris Criminal Court sentenced François Fillon to five years in prison, including two years closed, with ten years of ineligibility. His wife and his deputy receive a three-year suspended prison sentence. The condemned must repay nearly a million euros to the National Assembly. The appeal trial of François Fillon, his wife and his former deputy to the National Assembly Marc Joulaud will be held from November 15 to 30, 2021 in Paris.
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