PARIS; Former French prime minister Francois Fillon, whose 2017 bid for the presidency was torpedoed by a fake job scandal involving his wife, is to face trial over the allegations, a judicial source said on Tuesday.

Investigating judges have recommended the rightwinger be tried on charges of misusing public money, misuse of corporate assets, conspiracy and failing to fully disclose his financial assets to a French watchdog.

His Welsh-born wife Penelope faces the lesser charges of complicity in the misuse of public money and conspiring to misuse corporate assets, the legal source said.

“It’s the normal next step in the process,” one of Fillon’s political allies said.

Fillon was widely viewed as being on course to win the French presidency before revelations published by the investigative newspaper Le Canard Enchaine in January 2017 shattered his credibility.

His fall from grace opened the way for centrist Emmanuel Macron to win the election and dealt a blow to his conservative Republicans party, one of the mainstays of French political life, from which it is still struggling to recover.

Over several articles, Le Canard Enchaine said it had seen payslips showing that Penelope Fillon had been paid 680,000 euros ($725,000) as a parliamentary assistant to her husband between 1986 and 2013, but had done little or no work at the National Assembly.

She had also been paid a monthly salary by a magazine owned by a billionaire friend of the couple, La Revue des Deux Mondes, despite the editor never having seen her.

Fillon has also admitted taking an interest-free loan of 50,000 euros from the owner of the magazine, Marc Ladreit de Lacharriere, without declaring it to a transparency watchdog.

A lawyer for Fillon, Antonin Levy, said that news about the trial had been leaked to the press before his client had been informed.

“It demonstrates how this investigation has been carried out and we will react to the facts once we have seen the document ourselves,” he added.

Published in Dawn, April 24th, 2019