Fillon affair

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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...

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