France’s financial prosecutor has opened a preliminary investigation into the possible misuse of public funds by the rightwing presidential candidate François Fillon and his British wife. A newspaper alleges that she has been paid about €500,000 (£430,000) in eight years from parliamentary funds for what it claims could be a fake job.

Fillon, considered to be a frontrunner in May’s presidential election, is under pressure to explain Penelope Fillon’s role in his political operation after Le Canard Enchaîné claimed she was at various times paid an extremely generous salary from public funds allocated to him as an MP for the central Sarthe region.

Hiring family members is legal for French MPs and not against parliamentary rules, as long as the person is genuinely employed. But the newspaper claimed it was unable to track down anyone who had seen evidence of Penelope Fillon’s work.

Until now, she has been regarded as never having played a key role in her husband’s political life and has described her main occupation as raising their children. Penelope Fillon, who was born in Wales, told a TV documentary in 2008: “I don’t have a role,” saying she sometimes accompanied her husband on political outings “but that’s the limit”.

At issue is what work Penelope Fillon did to earn a salary of sometimes about €7,000 a month between the late 1990s and early 2010.

On a visit to Bordeaux, Fillon told reporters he was “scandalised” by the Canard Enchaîné article, which he described as “misogynistic”. He said: “So, because she’s my wife she shouldn’t be allowed to work?” He called it campaign mud-slinging, saying: “I see the stinkbomb season has started,” but he did not talk in detail about the nature of his wife’s work for him.

In a statement later, Fillon said he hoped to be interviewed by investigators “as soon as possible” to “set out the truth”, adding that the claims were “baseless.”



The issue is potentially deeply damaging for Fillon, who has not only styled himself as squeaky clean and immune to the sleaze allegations of French politics, but who has also campaigned on an austerity platform to cut wasteful public spending and axe 500,000 civil servant jobs.

MPs on the left said Fillon should immediately provide exact details of his wife’s work as a parliamentary assistant. Razzy Hammadi, a Socialist MP, said Fillon needed to publish proof of his wife’s work “within 24 hours”.

Despite 35 years in politics, including five years as prime minister, Fillon has presented himself in the presidential race as an anti-system candidate and an honest, austere and “irreproachable” antidote to years of corruption scandals on the French right.

Polls this month showed Fillon was considered a frontrunner to make it through to the final round of the highly unpredictable French presidential election in May, alongside the far right Front National’s Marine Le Pen. He also faces a challenge from the former economy minister Emmanuel Macron, who is running on a maverick outsider ticket as “neither left nor right”.

The former prime minister, Manuel Valls, who is running for the Socialist party’s nomination, told France Inter radio that Fillon “cannot say he is the candidate of honesty and not be able to answer this”.

Thierry Solère, Fillon’s spokesman, said Penelope Fillon had “indeed” worked for her husband in parliament. He told Agence France-Presse: “It is common for the spouses of MPs to work with them.” Another spokesman, Philippe Vigier, insisted Penelope Fillon’s work was not fictional.

Citing pay slips, the Canard Enchaîné claimed that Penelope Fillon, known as Penny, was paid from 1998 to 2002 from funds intended for parliamentary assistants. The Guardian has not seen the pay slips.

From 2002 to 2007, when Fillon took up a cabinet post under the then president Jacques Chirac, she became an assistant to Marc Joulaud, who carried out Fillon’s parliamentary duties in his place, earning €6,900 to €7,900 a month, an extraordinarily high salary for a parliamentary assistant.

A colleague of Joulaud’s told the paper: “ [I] never worked with [Penelope Fillon]. I have no information about this. I knew her only as a minister’s wife.”

The paper claimed Penelope Fillon was paid “for at least six months” in 2012 when Fillon, after serving as prime minister, left government following the defeat of the rightwing president Nicolas Sarkozy.

“In total, Penelope will have earned around €500,000 from parliamentary funds,” according to the paper.

Fillon told a television interviewer in November last year that his wife stayed at home in Sarthe while he worked as a lawmaker in Paris. “I didn’t have much time to see the first four [of five children] grow up because I was an MP,” he told an M6 TV show about politicians’ family lives. “It was 24/7, so basically they were raised by their mother.”

But he also said, without detailing which time period he was referring to: “She was very involved in the campaigns, handing out flyers and attending meetings with me.”

Fillon told the TV show last autumn that Penelope Fillon was no longer involved in politics.

Penelope Fillon, a trained lawyer, told the Sunday Telegraph in 2007, after her husband became prime minister, that she preferred being at the couple’s 12th-century chateau near Le Mans, western France, with her children and five horses than in Paris. She said of the city: “I’m just a country peasant, this is not my natural habitat.”