The rightwing French presidential candidate François Fillon has denied claims that his wife was paid about €500,000 (£430,000) over eight years from public funds for a parliamentary assistant’s job she never carried out.



He also said he would not stand down when he appeared on the evening news on TF1 to answer questions about a scandal that could prove explosive for his presidential bid.

Fillon said his British wife Penelope had worked for him since his first election in 1980 and that he had no intention of quitting the presidential race because he had not been formally charged with any crime.

France’s financial prosecutor this week opened a preliminary investigation into the possible misuse of public funds by Fillon and his wife. The Canard Enchaîné newspaper had claimed she was paid an extremely generous salary from parliamentary funds as Fillon’s parliamentary assistant, and then as assistant to his successor, but the paper claimed it could find no trace of her ever having carried out the work and no witnesses to her doing the job.



“My wife has always worked for me; she has always been by my side in my public life,” Fillon said.



“She corrected my speeches, she met a huge number of people who I couldn’t see, she represented me at events, she did press reviews for me and she passed on people’s requests.”

Fillon, a former prime minister, said his wife’s work for him was “real, legal and transparent” and he would “sue newspapers who say my wife had a fake job”. He also revealed that he had employed two of his children, who were lawyers, from public funds while he was a senator.

Hiring family members as assistants is legal for French MPs, as long as the person is genuinely employed. However, Penelope Fillon has always told the media she played no role in her husband’s political life and raised their children at their chateau in western France while her husband worked.

Fillon said the work of a parliamentary assistant was not a job that had precise norms, nor a job “that you necessarily do in an office”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Penelope and François Fillon at a rally in Paris last November. Photograph: Charles Platiau/Reuters

He added: “A parliamentary assistant is an adviser who carries out their role near their boss and you can’t say that we didn’t spend time together.”

He was not pressed on how to explain the extremely well-paid parliamentary assistant work that his wife did for the MP who later replaced him in his constituency.

Asked why his wife had always publicly insisted she had no role in her husband’s political life, he said: “She never did politics in the sense that she was never in the front line. She did daily work for me.”

He said he would not be where he was today without his wife’s work and suggested he was the victim of a dirty plot. “There’s something rotten in this democracy,” he said.

In his TV appearance, Fillon did not show any documentation to prove his wife’s work. His lawyer briefly went to the state financial prosecutor’s office on Thursday but it was not confirmed whether or not he had handed in documentation.

The prosecutor’s office is also looking at a second job revealed by the Canard Enchaîné in which Penelope Fillon was paid about €5,000 a month between May 2012 and December 2013 by a literary review owned by a billionaire businessman friend of Fillon. The editor said he had never seen her at the magazine and only knew of two short book reviews she wrote in that time, published under a pseudonym.

Fillon said his wife’s role on the literary review was an advisory one and he had seen her doing the work.

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 campaigned on an austerity platform to cut wasteful public spending and axe 500,000 civil servant jobs.