French Election Scandal: Francois Fillon Accused Of Paying Wife Government Funds For No-Show Job

French prosecutors are investigating whether presidential candidate Francois Fillon’s British-born wife was paid 500,000 euros ($538,000) from parliamentary funds but never actually did any work.

Accusations of financial impropriety are nothing new in France. Both former President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Alain Juppe were convicted of misusing public funds in the mid-1990s.

Fillon, a former right-wing prime minister who is seen as the front-runner in the presidential race, has rejected the accusations, saying they showed “contempt and misogyny.”

"I see the stink bomb season has started," Fillon said, referring to the election campaign. He faces far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen and a Socialist candidate who will be selected Sunday, either education Minister Benoit Hamon or former Prime Minister Manuel Valls.

"This affair will go 'pschitt,’ “ Fillon attorney Bruno Retailleau said Thursday, using a word that describes the sound fireworks make when the fuse burns but the firework fails to ignite.

The satirical French weekly Le Canard Enchaine reported it found little evidence Penelope Fillon did any work as a parliamentary assistant from 1992 to 2002, first for Fillon and then for his successor in the National Assembly, or in a later job as a literary reviewer for a cultural journal, Reuters reported.

It is not illegal for members of the French Parliament to hire family members, but they are expected to earn their salaries.

Much of Le Pen’s campaign centers on removing the “rotten” political establishment ways of doing things, but the National Front also is under investigation for alleged improper financial conduct. Le Pen has been uncharacteristically reticent about the allegations.

Fillon spokesman Thierry Solere told Agence France-Presse Penelope Fillon worked as a spokeswoman for her husband, saying it is common “for the spouses of MPs to work with them.”

“Just because she is my wife she should not be entitled to work? Could you imagine a politician saying, as this story did, that the only thing a woman can do is making jam? All the feminists would scream," Fillon said.

The controversy spawned the hashtag #PenelopeGate.

Penelope Fillon told London’s Sunday Telegraph she spent her time at the couple’s 12th-century chateau near Le Mans in western France while her husband was in office.

"I'm just a country peasant, this [Paris] is not my natural habitat," she said.

The Paris newspaper Le Monde said the allegations could derail Fillon’s proposals to trim the French bureaucracy by 500,000 civil jobs. The newspaper said Fillon’s mission to make France “perfect” can only be accomplished if he himself is perfect.

"You can't be the candidate of honesty and transparency and not respond," Socialist Valls told France Inter radio.