Former French Prime Minister François Fillon, his wife Penelope, and his former assistant Marc Joulaud, have been found guilty of misappropriation of public funds, complicity and concealment by the Paris tribunal, EDNews.net reports citing CNN.
The judgement concluded Fillon paid his wife and children, as well as Joulaud, hundreds of thousands of euros from the public payroll for little or no work.
Fillon was sentenced to five years in prison, three of them suspended, as well as a fine of 375,000 euros ($423,000) and a ten -year ban on running for elections.
His wife Penelope was sentence to a suspended prison sentence of three years and a fine of 375,000 euros.
The Fillons and their co-defendant were also ordered to reimburse more than one million euros ($1.13 million) to the French National Assembly.
"This decision ... is not fair and we will appeal," Antonin Lévy, Fillon's lawyer told BFM-TV. "There will be a new trial. In the past few days we have started to understand the ludicrous conditions in which this investigation was launched."