PARIS: French billionaire Marc Ladreit de Lacharriere has been charged over a fake jobs scandal that embroiled defeated rightwing presidential candidate Francois Fillon in January, a report said Sunday.

Ladreit de Lacharriere employed Fillon’s wife Penelope at his magazine La Revue des Deux Mondes from May 2012 to December 2013 with a pre-tax monthly salary of 5,000 euros ($5,500) a month.

The businessman, a close friend of Fillon, was summoned by three investigating judges on Friday evening and charged with misuse of corporate assets, the Journal du Dimanche newspaper said.

Fillon and his British-born wife have both been charged after revelations in the newspaper Le Canard Enchaine in January that his wife had been employed as a parliamentary assistant for 15 years.

She is suspected by investigators of having done little or no work for her salary that totalled hundreds of thousands of euros.—AFP