Hubert Falco has “completely flouted” his duty to set an example, the Marseilles court said on Friday. The court sentenced the mayor of Toulon to a three-year suspended prison sentence and five years of ineligibility with immediate effect, resulting in the loss of his mandates. A strong man of Var politics for thirty years, this 75-year-old elected official who had left the Les Républicains party to join the camp of President Emmanuel Macron, left the court headlong, without a word after his conviction for concealment of embezzlement of public funds.
The provisional execution of a penalty of ineligibility means that the penalty is immediately applicable, even in the event of an appeal on his part. These convictions are in accordance with the requisitions of the prosecution who had qualified this file as a “real scandal”. The confiscation of a sum of 55,000 euros seized from his account was also pronounced.
Meals and laundry expenses from public funds
Justice reproached Hubert Falco, who is also president of the Toulon metropolis, for having continued to have lunch for free for years in the cafeteria of the Departmental Council, when he had not been president for more than ten years, and to have benefited from meals on wheels and laundry costs, also paid for by public funds from this community.
These meals were stored in a dedicated refrigerator, hence the name of this file: “Falco’s fridge”. In total, these private meals served to Hubert Falco and his wife, an employee of the county council, would have cost the taxpayer at least 64,500 euros between 2015 and 2018, according to investigators. That is 1,500 euros per month. In a long statement of her decision, which she is accustomed to, the president of the Marseille criminal court, Céline Ballerini, told her: “We heard the witnesses say that you were an excellent mayor, that you had done a lot”.
Deprived of his civil rights, the “worst sentence”
“But the question is not there”, she added, because the facts, “by their smallness”, testify “to an obvious lack of respect” of the institutions and show that “the Departmental Council remained your territory” . Not to mention the “steps that were revealed by the tapping” during the investigation and which “testify to this contempt for the rules and the desire to escape certain realities”, added the magistrate.
Strong man of the Var for thirty years, Hubert Falco left deprived of civil rights, the “worst sentence for me”, he said Friday morning. According to the procedure, after a conviction for ineligibility accompanied by a provisional execution, the prefect of the Var must issue an order signifying the termination of the mandates of the local elected official concerned.