a trial required for 27 folks, including Marine Le Pen | EUROtoday

Published on : 09/22/2023 – 12:29Modified : 09/22/2023 – 3:57 p.m.

2 minutes

Towards a trial for Marine Le Pen, her occasion and her management of the 2010s? The Paris prosecutor’s workplace has requested a felony listening to for the National Rally (previously National Front) and 27 folks, suspected of getting embezzled European public funds to pay assistants truly working for the occasion.

Marine Le Pen has all the time contested any infringement on this matter.

In element, the prosecution is requesting a trial for 11 individuals who have been elected MEPs on National Front lists, 12 individuals who have been their parliamentary assistants, but in addition 4 collaborators from the far-right occasion.

In this lengthy listing bringing collectively the overwhelming majority of occasion figures from the mid-2010s embrace the mayor of Perpignan, Louis Aliot, the previous quantity 2 of the occasion Bruno Gollnisch, the chief vice-president of “Reconquête!”, Nicolas Bay , the previous treasurer Wallerand de Saint-Just or the deputy and spokesperson for the RN Julien Odoul.

For the National Rally, taken as a authorized entity, the prosecution is requesting a trial for complicity and concealment of embezzlement of public funds, over the whole interval coated.

The prosecution emphasizes that “the penalties incurred are ten years’ imprisonment, and a fine of maximum one million euros or double the proceeds of the offense”, and recollects that “the legislator has made the additional penalty of deprivation obligatory of the right to be elected, for a maximum period of five years, or ten years for an elected person or member of the government.”

To haveMarine Le Pen: “The European Parliament is in an aggressive approach, all our rights have been violated”

A “system of diversion” of envelopes allotted by the EU

The investigation started in March 2015, when the European Parliament introduced that it had referred doable irregularities dedicated by the National Front (since renamed RN) to the EU anti-fraud workplace regarding salaries paid to parliamentary assistants.

The investigations have been then entrusted on the finish of 2016 to 2 Parisian monetary investigating judges.

Marine Le Pen was indicted in June 2017 for “breach of trust” and (*27*), prices later reclassified as “embezzlement of public funds”.

The magistrates suspect the RN of getting “concertedly and deliberately” put in place a “system of embezzlement” of the envelopes (21,000 euros per thirty days) allotted by the European Union to every deputy to pay parliamentary assistants.

The latter would in actuality have labored all or half for the RN, thus permitting it substantial wage financial savings.

The European Parliament, the civil occasion, assessed its injury in 2018 at 6.8 million euros for the years 2009 to 2017.

With AFP