2023-04-19 19:07:59
Sentenced on Friday April 14 to three years in prison suspended and five years of ineligibility for concealment of embezzlement of public funds, Hubert Falco was officially dismissed from his functions as mayor of Toulon, according to an order published by the Var prefecture on Wednesday 19 april.
Dated April 18, the decree brings him to resign « d’office » of his mandates “of municipal councilor of the municipality of Toulon and of metropolitan councilor of the Toulon-Provence-Mediterranean metropolis”. From now on, the municipal council of the Var city and the council of the metropolis have fifteen days from the publication of this prefectural decree to meet in order to proceed with the election of a new mayor and his deputies.
Until then, it is his first assistant, Josée Massi, who will act as interim head of this city of 170,000 inhabitants. “She will be able to watch over the destinies of the city so that the commitments that my team and I have made to the Toulonnais in 2020 are respected until the end of the mandate”explained Mr. Falco in a letter sent Wednesday to his constituents and of which Agence France-Presse (AFP) obtained a copy.
“The legal history is not over”
The 75-year-old elected official, ex-member of the Les Républicains party, now rallied to Emmanuel Macron, was sentenced on Friday by the Marseille criminal court to three years’ suspended imprisonment, with the confiscation of 55,000 euros which had been seized on his account and to a penalty of ineligibility of five years with provisional execution, that is to say applicable immediately, despite the appeal lodged by Mr. Falco on Tuesday.
Justice reproached the mayor of Toulon, 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 the public funds of this community.
“The legal story is not over. I will never cease to restore my honor”, said Mr. Falco in his letter, without specifying his future intentions if his sentence of ineligibility was lifted on appeal. The conviction of the strong man from Var was a real earthquake for Toulon where he had been re-elected three times in the first round and where he presented himself as a bulwark at the National Rally, from which he had taken over the city in 2001.
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