Archive / Presidential hopeful François Fillon poses prior to a broadcast interview at French TV channel TF1, on January 26, 2017, just outside Paris.

France’s conservative candidate for the presidency, François Fillon, said Thursday he would step out of the race if prosecutors decided to file preliminary charges over an allegedly fake job held by his wife.

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Scrambling to stem a potentially crippling scandal, Fillon told French channel TF1 there was nothing improper or illegal about his employing his Welsh-born wife, Penelope, as his parliamentary aide for years.

He said "her work was real" and that he would provide investigators with "all necessary proof". But he said he wouldn't submit to being tried in the media.

"Only one thing would prevent me from being a candidate: it's if my honour was harmed, if I were given preliminary charges," Fillon, one of the top contenders in the French presidential election this spring, said.

"I have always said that I wouldn't be able to be a candidate for the presidential election if there was evidence that I had broken the law. This is not the case," he said.

Fillon also revealed that he had employed two of his children, who were lawyers, from public funds while he was a senator.

It's not illegal for French legislators to hire their relatives as long as they are genuinely employed.

Le Canard Enchainé, the satirical and investigative weekly that broke the story on Wednesday, said Penelope Fillon was paid about 500,000 euros ($537,000) in public funds for her work as parliamentary aide.

But the newspaper said it found no evidence that she had done any actual work for her husband, and former aides it spoke to said they had never seen her.

France's financial prosecutors swiftly opened a preliminary investigation into suspected embezzlement and misappropriation of public funds.

The prosecutors are also looking at a second job revealed by the Canard Enchaîné in which Penelope Fillon was paid some €5,000 a month by a literary review owned by a billionaire friend of Fillon, and whose former editor claims he was unaware of her employment.

Reputation at stake

In his defence on Thursday, the conservative hopeful offered examples of the work he said his wife did as his aide during the late 1990s and 2000s.

Fillon said she corrected his speeches, received "countless" people who wanted to see him, represented him at events and meetings and summarised the news for him.

The job of parliamentary aide is not a "standardized job, which meets specific rules", he said.

The former prime minister denounced opponents who he said are attacking his wife to damage him less than three months before the first round of the presidential election.

"I will defend her, I love her, I will protect her," he said.

As the conservative nominee, Fillon has been championing transparency and deep cuts in the ranks of civil servants to lower government spending.

Opinion polls say he is favourite to reach the second round of France’s presidential election on May 7, where he is tipped to defeat far-right leader Marine Le Pen.

However, the burgeoning scandal and Fillon’s initially clumsy defence – accusing the Canard Enchainé of “misogyny” – threaten to smear his squeaky-clean image.

“The only way not to fuel suspicions is, in Fillon’s own words, to be ‘irreproachable’,” wrote Le Monde, France’s daily of record, in an editorial on Friday. “It’s now up to him to prove he was.”

(FRANCE 24 with AP)

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