Jérôme Cahuzac, the disgraced French former budget minister who led a crackdown on tax avoidance while secretly hiding millions of euros of his own money from authorities, has had his conviction for tax fraud upheld by an appeals court.



The case – in which the leftwing campaigner for a more honest tax system was found to have been personally cheating tax on a vast scale – was one of France’s biggest political scandals of the decade and increased public mistrust in the political class.

Cahuzac, 65, a former cosmetic surgeon, was sentenced on Tuesday to four years in prison – with two years suspended – for tax fraud and money laundering. The sentence was less severe than after his first trial in 2016, when he had been given three years in prison.

It is up to a sentencing judge to decide whether Cahuzac will serve time in jail or whether the two-year term will be reduced. He was also fined €300,000 (£263,000) and banned from running for office for five years.

Cahuzac was appointed by François Hollande in 2012 to lead the socialist president’s drive against wealthy tax-avoiders and make the rich pay their share of dragging France out of its economic woes.



But, within months, the investigative website Mediapart revealed that Cahuzac had been hiding his own money. He denied it, lying to parliament before admitting in 2013 that he had hidden money in an account in Switzerland for 20 years.

Cahuzac and his ex-wife, Patricia Ménard, who was also convicted of tax fraud, had jointly run a lucrative hair-transplant business treating some of France’s biggest celebrities. They hid millions of euros from the tax authorities for two decades, moving their money across the world from Switzerland to Singapore and the Isle of Man.

After the Cahuzac scandal broke, Hollande reinforced measures on financial corruption, ethics and transparency in political life.