2023-12-08 19:17:52
MP and president of the National Rally group, Marine Le Pen, during a debate on French sovereignty, nationality, immigration and asylum, at the National Assembly, in Paris, December 7, 2023. LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP
After François Bayrou and the MoDem, whose trial ended at the end of November, it is the turn of Marine Le Pen and the National Rally (RN, at the time National Front) to be referred to a criminal court for suspicion of embezzlement of European funds. At the end of an eight-year investigation, the two investigating judges confirmed the requisitions of the prosecutor of the specialized interregional financial jurisdiction of the Paris public prosecutor’s office and requested the referral to justice of the party and 27 of its executives, including Marine Le Pen, its president, for acts of “embezzlement of public funds” and “complicity in embezzlement of public funds”. Facts punishable not only by prison sentences but above all by ineligibility. The trial should be held in October and November 2024, specifies the Paris prosecutor’s office.
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Just like the MoDem, RN executives are suspected of having designed a mechanism aimed at financing the party’s hiring using European funds allocated to remunerating the parliamentary assistants of MEPs. Implemented between 2004 and 2016, the system would have caused damage estimated by the European Parliament at nearly 7 million euros, part of which has already been recovered in the form of deductions from the salaries of RN MEPs. Marine Le Pen thus paid 326,401 euros in July.
The affair broke out in 2015 following an anonymous report made to the services of the European Parliament. They quickly note that 20 of the 80 employees mentioned in the National Front organization chart also occupy the position of parliamentary assistant to a party MEP. The European Parliament referred the matter to the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) and the French justice system, which opened a preliminary investigation on December 15, 2016.
“I have no “proof of work””
Searches carried out in 2016 and 2017 by OLAF revealed exchanges of correspondence between Marine Le Pen and the party treasurer, Wallerand de Saint-Just, in which the latter mentioned, in June 2014, the need for training, heavily in debt, to realize “significant savings thanks to the European Parliament”. In another exchange dated from the same period, between Mr. de Saint-Just and a MEP, Jean-Luc Schaffhauser, the latter is concerned: “What Marine is asking us is tantamount to signing for fictitious jobs… and it is the MP who is criminally responsible. »
Other correspondence seized during the searches seems to show that the assistants themselves were worried about a possible investigation, like Mickaël Ehrminger, theoretically attached to Florian Philippot, then a senior executive of the party. In September 2016, he inquired with Joffrey Bollée, then Mr. Philippot’s chief of staff, about the risk of an investigation by Parliament’s services, explaining: “If that’s the case I’m in trouble, I don’t have any “proof of work”. I do not write any European notes for Flo, I do not have access to her European emails. » Sophie Montel or Aymeric Chauprade, two former MEPs, will evoke in their testimonies an organized system, Marine Le Pen requiring, according to Ms. Montel, MEPs that they only recruit one assistant by themselves, the rest of their envelope to be allocated to employees of party executives.
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