and a French Court has found the former
Prime Minister Francois fian guilty of
fraud and embezzlement let's talk to a
Paris correspondent Xu Scofield about
this hue this is a real fall from grace
yeah d-dad it's a very very severe
sentence which he will appeal I hasten
to add I mean he's not going to be
walked off to jail today but he did get
a five year jail term through them
suspended said 2-year he faces two years
in jail and his wife Penelope
british-born Penelope for your has a
two-year suspended sentence as well so
you know it's a it's a damning verdict
and in its judgment the court made some
statements which were very very severe
towards the couple in in particular
towards for your former prime minister
of course former frontrunner to win the
presidency and in at the last election
who the court said had put private gain
over public good and had failed
obviously and clearly in his duty to
probity and exemplary as a as a public
official by giving his wife this fake
job and that was the basis of the charge
against him that for all these years
he'd employed her as his assistant and
drawn hundreds of thousands of euros
pounds dollars of public funds to do
that and but that in fact she done
nothing there and that the case hinged
on the argument of whether or not she'd
actually done a job and the court
decided that she hadn't and this money
had therefore been misappropriated who
as you say a front-runner in the
presidential race and and a real
celebrated career well yes I mean he was
a stalwart of the French center-right
came back 20 years have been a very very
young parliamentarian in the early 90s
served under Chirac served as prime
minister and and Sarkozy and then and
then was the front-runner 2017 to be the
to be the next president if we cast our
minds back to then just four years ago
it was looking very much as if the the
center-right would win after all so our
Lord and who was going to lead
center-right when it turned that that
Francois feel was he won the primaries
and right up to January February of 2017
it
like he was being written up as the man
who's going to be in France as makes
president and then this dramatic
spectacular collapse caused by the
revelations in a newspaper and and that
that is very germane to all of this
because of course part of the the
defense of what his lawyers I've been
arguing and will continue arguing the
appeal is that there is a much more to
this than meets the eye and that in
addition to the arguments about whether
or not he's guilty of what he's accused
of doing there should be another
argument about how this came into the
public eye and the speed with which the
property the prosecutor's office reacted
to it in a way that they say was
unwanted and showed that it was being
directed from above in some way Hugh
thanks very much for that update there
from Paris