Marine Le Pen, her father Jean-Marie, the National Rally and its management of the 2010s have to be judged in Paris in October and November 2024, just a few months after the European elections, within the case of the assistants of National Front MEPs.
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Marine Le Pen, her father (Jean-Marie Le Pen), the RN and the celebration management of the 2010s will likely be tried in Paris within the fall of 2024, suspected of getting put in place between 2004 and 2016 a system of remuneration by the European Union of assistants to MEPs who really labored for the celebration.
Marine Le Pen, who has at all times contested the accusations, will likely be tried for embezzlement of public funds and complicity.
The National Rally (RN) affirmed on Friday December 8 that Marine Le Pen had “committed no offense or irregularity” and “formally contested the accusations made against our European deputies and parliamentary assistants”.
The former president of the celebration (2011-2022) is introduced, within the referral order signed Friday by the 2 monetary investigating judges and consulted by AFP, as “one of the main people responsible for the system thus implemented place when she had been informed by her discussions with the party treasurer, in 2013, of the need to relieve the FN’s finances.
“This decision is unfortunately not a surprise,” reacted in a press release Me Rodolphe Bosselut, lawyer for the president of the RN group in the National Assembly.
His father – co-founder of the flame party in 1972 – will also be on the dock alongside the mayor of Perpignan Louis Aliot, the former number 2 of the party Bruno Gollnisch, the executive vice-president of Reconquête ! Nicolas Bay, the former treasurer Wallerand de Saint-Just or the deputy and spokesperson for the RN Julien Odoul.
Read alsoMarine Le Pen: “The European Parliament is in an aggressive approach, all our rights have been violated”
In total, 11 people who were elected MEPs on National Front lists, twelve others who were their parliamentary assistants and four collaborators from the far-right party will be judged. The National Rally, as a legal entity, will have to answer for complicity and concealment of embezzlement of public funds, over the entire period covered.
The trial must be held in October and November 2024, four months after the European elections, according to the Paris prosecutor’s office. A first hearing on the organization of this trial is scheduled for March 27, the public prosecutor said.
The investigation began in March 2015 after the European Parliament announced its referral to the EU anti-fraud office into possible irregularities committed by the FN concerning salaries paid to parliamentary assistants.
“We’re going to get lit”
At the end of the judicial investigation, opened in 2016, “numerous parts make it doable to envisage the institution of a fraud system initially supposed to make sure the financing of jobs hooked up to these near Jean-Marie Le Pen , then president of the FN, and who progressively benefited extra usually” to the party, write the two investigating judges.
Among these elements is a letter from the treasurer of the Wallerand de Saint-Just party addressed on June 16, 2016 to Marine Le Pen mentioning “expenses (which) tend to get out of control”. “We will only get out of this if we make significant savings thanks to the European Parliament and if we obtain additional payments,” according to him.
At the end of a meeting in June 2014 on the provision by MEPs of part of the budgetary envelopes, MEP Jean-Luc Schaffhauser wrote to the treasurer: “What Marine is asking us is equal to signing for fictitious jobs… and it’s the MP who’s criminally chargeable for his personal funds even when the celebration is the beneficiary”. “I understand Marine’s reasons but we’re going to get caught,” warns Jean-Luc Schaffhauser.
Documents recovered by investigators, including summary tables of jobs, “demonstrate a globalized management of envelopes, the search for optimization of salary imputations and for certain assistants the purely accounting nature of their attachment”, underline the magistrates, who note “the interference of FN leaders” in the management of these jobs.
The investigating judges insist on the “systemic nature of the embezzlements” which, over the course of legislatures, have become “a means of financing the party” in a context of financial difficulties.
The European Parliament, civil party, assessed its damage in 2018 at 6.8 million euros for the years 2009 to 2017. One of its lawyers did not wish to react on Friday.
The parallel trial of European parliamentary assistants from the UDF and the MoDem has just ended in Paris, with a deliberation scheduled for February 5.
Me Rodolphe Bosselut denounced an “unequal remedy (which) calls into query the impartiality of the prosecutions”, stressing that within the case of the centrists, the parliamentary assistants weren’t the topic of prosecutions.
With AFP
https://www.france24.com/fr/france/20231208-assistants-d-eurod%C3%A9put%C3%A9s-du-fn-marine-le-pen-le-parti-et-26-personnes-jug%C3%A9s-%C3%A0-l-automne-2024