A control apparatus for controlling the main circuit for driving an AC electric motor consisting of a diode converter and a pulse width modulation (PWM) power converting device, in which it is arranged that the DC current as the output of the diode converter is detected by a current detector, the AC component of this DC current is filtered through a high-pass filter, and a pulse-width-modulation control is exercised by a control circuit in response to the output of the high-pass filter so that the DC current as the output of the diode converter may be smoothed out in the main circuit by the PWM power converting device. By such arrangement, this control apparatus of an electric motor is made smaller in size and simplified in structure and enabled to control the power factor of the power source of the diode converter to close to 1.0.