New Fillon claim: was key campaign aide paid by billionaire for ‘fake work’?

A key aide to François Fillon was employed at a billionaire’s charitable foundation while also working for the right-wing presidential candidate, Mediapart can reveal. Alexia Demirdjian, who has been a major figure in Fillon’s digital strategy since the spring of 2015, was hired as a project manager by the Fondation Culture et Diversité in March of the very same year. But Alexia Demirdjian left no public trace of her work at the foundation, an organisation which helps young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to get access to art and culture, and which is part of the Fimalac group run by billionaire Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière. He is the man who paid Fillon’s wife Penelope €100,000 to work on his magazine Revue des Deux Mondes, for which she appears to have done little work.