French interior minister resigns over daughters’ holiday jobs scandal

The French interior minister has been forced to resign in a row over employing his teenage daughters as parliamentary assistants during the school holidays.

Bruno Le Roux stood down hours after the financial prosecutor’s office announced they were putting him under preliminary investigation. He had offered his resignation earlier in the day to the president, François Hollande, who accepted it.

The hiring of family members by politicians, while legal under French law, has become a sensitive issue after conservative candidate Francois Fillon became embroiled in a similar scandal over parliamentary assistant jobs for his wife and two of his children.

Le Roux, 51, has admitted he paid his daughters, now aged 20 and 23, €55,000 of public money over seven years. They were given 24 short-term contracts, known as CDDs, between 2009 and 2016 while he sat in the national assembly.

French parliamentarians are allowed to employ relatives if the jobs are real and work is actually done. Le Roux says his daughters’ roles filled these requirements.

"Those work contracts ... correspond to work that was effectively carried out," Le Roux said in a televised statement, seeking to draw a distinction with the case of Fillon, who is accused of having paid his wife hundreds of thousands of euros for work she did not do.

“This work was as important for me as it was educative for them,” he added. “I affirm my honesty on a human level and in all my political acts.”

Earlier in the day Le Roux rejected comparisons with the Fillon scandal. “Yes, my daughters worked with me, mainly during the summer or other school holidays, but never on a permanent basis,” he told the television programme Quotidien, broadcast on the TMC channel, which broke the story on Monday night.

“We’re talking about a summer job with a parliamentarian. When it’s a case of doing filing or a number of parliamentary tasks, I think it’s a good life experience.”

The eldest Le Roux daughter was 15 when she first worked for her father, for 12 days in 2009, it is claimed. The legal work age in France is 16, unless the person is employed by a parent.

However, Le Roux is under pressure to explain how the date of one contract, during the 2013 summer holidays, coincides with the time his daughter was doing work experience at the cosmetic company Yves Rocher in Belgium.

Le Roux was appointed interior minister last December, after Hollande reshuffled his government following Manuel Valls’s resignation as Prime Minister to concentrate on his presidential campaign, which ended in a primary vote defeat in January to Benoît Hamon.

On Tuesday morning, Le Roux cancelled an official engagement to inaugurate a national security and intelligence institute in Paris. The new interior minister was named on Tuesday afternoon as Matthias Fekl.