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| - A right-wing power couple that ran a wealthy Paris suburb for decades were given three-year jail terms on Wednesday and barred from holding office for 10 years after losing their appeals against their convictions for tax fraud. Patrick Balkany, the cigar-chomping mayor of the northwestern suburb of Levallois-Perret, and his wife Isabelle, who is deputy mayor, were found guilty of tax fraud "on an exceptional scale." At their original fraud trial in September, Patrick Balkany, 71, was sentenced to four years behind bars and Isabelle, 72, to three years for hiding millions of euros in assets from the taxman. The Paris court of appeal on Wednesday suspended one year of the mayor's four-year jail term and confirmed his wife's three-year sentence. Next month, the court will hear the couple's appeal against a separate conviction for money laundering. The larger-than-life Balkany, a close friend of former president Nicolas Sarkozy and late rocker Johnny Hallyday, was given five years' imprisonment and his wife four years for that offence. Their jail terms -- extremely rare for French politicians -- were widely heralded as proof that the legal system no longer shirks from holding the powerful to account. Isabelle Balkany, however, has avoided jail until now in light of a recent suicide attempt and is still considered unlikely to serve hard time. Her husband, meanwhile, was released into house arrest in February because of health problems and is unlikely to return to prison Patrick Balkany was first elected mayor of Levallois-Perret in 1983 and also had a seat in parliament for many years. He and his wife were found guilty of using offshore accounts to hide at least 13 million euros ($14.4 million) in assets from the tax authorities, including luxury villas in the Moroccan city of Marrakesh and in the West Indies. The couple argued that their wealth was mainly inherited -- Isabelle's Tunisian Jewish father made a fortune in rubber production, while Patrick's father, an Auschwitz survivor, founded a luxury clothing chain in postwar Paris. They are among several prominent politicians, many of them on the right, to be charged with financial misconduct in recent years. Sarkozy has been ordered to stand trial in two different affairs, one for illegal campaign funding and another for corruption. And Sarkozy's former prime minister, Francois Fillon, went on trial last month on charges of using public funds to pay his wife for a fake job as a parliamentary assistant. sb/cb/lc
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