The leader of France's embattled main opposition UMP party has quit after shock claims that invoices for former president Nicolas Sarkozy's election campaign were billed as party expenses.
Several heavyweights of the centre-right party, including Sarkozy's former prime minister Francois Fillon, demanded Jean-Francois Cope's resignation following the latest twist in a corruption scandal engulfing him and a PR firm owned by his associates.
Cope, who had so far shunned calls for his ouster, agreed to step down from June 15, UMP officials said on Tuesday.
The party top brass had gathered in Paris for a meeting to review its dismal performance in Sunday's European elections, but the spotlight swung on the latest scandal after Sarkozy's former deputy campaign director alleged more fraud.
Jerome Lavrilleux dropped a bombshell on television on Monday, claiming that bills for Sarkozy's failed 2012 re-election campaign were passed off as invoices for party conferences.
Although Lavrilleux said they were "anomalies" and claimed that neither Sarkozy nor Cope were in the loop, the latest saga in the so-called Bygmalion scandal was a further blow to the party, which suffered its first ever defeat to the far-right National Front party during the weekend European elections.
According to French media reports, Event & Cie, a subsidiary of the Bygmalion PR company owned by Cope's friends, over-billed the UMP, allegedly earning at least 8 million euros during the campaign to organise rallies.
Just hours before Lavrilleux's dramatic claim, a lawyer for Bygmalion said the company had been pressured to falsify Sarkozy's bills or risk not getting paid.
The fraud was allegedly conducted to skirt France's campaign finance laws.
Sarkozy, who has been implicated in several corruption scandals and denies any wrongdoing in any of them, is "very unhappy to see his name dragged into this strange affair", his close ally and former minister Brice Hortefeux said on Tuesday.
Cope has also been roundly attacked by Sarkozy's former prime minister Fillon - with whom he fought a tough, bitter and long battle for the UMP's leadership in 2012.
Fillon said the UMP's "credibility and honour have been damaged" after the European elections debacle in which the party came second with 20.8 per cent of the vote.
Fillon has made no secret of his desire to be a presidential candidate in 2017 even if his former boss Sarkozy wants to make a comeback.
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