Caroline Cayeux, who served as French President Emmanuel Macron’s minister delegate for local authorities in 2022, has been sentenced for tax fraud and lying about her personal wealth.
She was found guilty on April 1 and French media reported it yesterday.
The Paris court handed Cayeux a 10-month suspended prison sentence, a €100,000 fine and two years of ineligibility to run for parliament. after she admitted under a plea bargain to deliberately understating her fortune by €11.7 million.
The deception significantly reduced her liability for the French wealth tax (IFI). The case was handled discreetly via a guilty plea procedure.
The conviction adds to a lengthening list of scandals involving senior figures from the Macronist era and raises fresh questions about standards at the top of French public life.
Cayeux, a former long-serving mayor of Beauvais from the traditional Right who joined Macron’s government under then-prime minister Élisabeth Borne, resigned months later in November 2022 after the Haute Autorité pour la Transparence de la Vie Publique (HATVP), or High Authority for Transparency in Public Life, exposed the discrepancies in her asset declaration.
At the time, she said she resigned “to be free to defend herself”, adding “to have followed the evaluations that her tax lawyers had advised her to declare”.
Her declared wealth had been listed at around €9 million while the true figure exceeded €20 million.
A house of 400sqm in Dinard (Ille-et-Vilaine) was been declared at some €1.6 million below its true value and an apartment of 213sqm in Paris was undervalued by about €2.5 million.
The episode was politically awkward for a President who came to power in 2017 promising to “moralise” public life and break with the old corrupt practices of the establishment.
Cayeux is not the first Macron-aligned or allied figure facing such troubles.
Reports from anti-corruption groups (such as Anticor) and media tallies indicate that at least 26 ministers or senior figures appointed under Macron since 2017 have faced some similar form of political or legal scrutiny.
Notable names include President of the Constitutional Council Richard Ferrand, former chief of staff Alexis Kohler, ex-labour minister Olivier Dussopt, former culture minister Rachida Dati, ex-French prime minister François Bayrou and former MP Thierry Solère.
There has been a broader pattern of French political class scandals throughout the years, from ex-economy minister Jérôme Cahuzac under then-president François Hollande to various cases under then-prime minister François Fillon and then-president Nicolas Sarkoz.
Critics argue that France’s complex tax system, high wealth taxes and opaque declaration rules create both temptation and opportunity for those in power.
The conviction comes as the French Government pushes new legislation to combat tax and social fraud, measures that are easier to apply to ordinary taxpayers than to well-connected insiders with sophisticated legal and financial advice.
Société Générale, the major French multinational banking and financial services company, has been raided by police as part of a high-profile alleged tax fraud and money laundering investigation. https://t.co/Ow6CUXo7pc
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) June 26, 2025
