The Paris prosecutor’s office opened a preliminary investigation at the end of September for “embezzlement of public funds” targeting the presidential campaign of LR candidate Valérie Pécresse, the Paris prosecutor’s office told Le Parisien, confirming information from BFMTV. This investigation, entrusted to the Brigade for the repression of economic crime, follows, according to our colleagues, a report made by the green deputy Julien Bayou last spring.
Initially, the report did not target acts of “embezzlement of public funds” but those of “illegal financing of electoral campaigns, illegal financing of political parties, misuse of corporate assets and/or illegal taking of interests. “. This offense has, at this stage, not been retained. “We did not rush to open because there were a lot of checks to be done on this report”, confides a judicial source to the Parisian.
This report would have its origin in a letter written at the beginning of March by the regional councilor of Île-de-France Babette de Rozières, who had decided to leave with a bang the campaign of the candidate LR by denouncing a campaign “outside the ground “, a term that she had repeated again with the Parisian a few days later.
In her letter, she also criticized the organization of many events to which the candidate ultimately never went. “For several months, I have constantly regretted your recurring absences from the events that I organized in your interest (restaurant party, seniors party, bistro party, inauguration of the 1st site of the gastronomy trail at the hotel of the navy that I created in Île-de-France, week of taste with children from disadvantaged families, etc.)” could we read.
Given rather high in the polls at the end of the primary organized by her party, Valérie Pécresse had subsequently experienced a long descent into hell, to the point of finishing to everyone’s surprise below the fateful bar of 5%, the one that allows to obtain reimbursement of his campaign expenses. A rout that had led her to seek funding to repay the 5.1 million euros that she had personally borrowed for her campaign. She had finally succeeded by collecting 3.3 million euros in donations, while the party had completed the missing sum.