Fernand Le Rachinel didn’t know “that it was illegal” | EUROtoday

Fernand Le Rachinel is the primary of 12 defendants to face questions from the courtroom, on the third day of the attraction trial of the European parliamentary assistants of the National Front (FN). The former MEP may be very pleasant, all the time dressed to the nines, however didn’t know the way, on Thursday January 15, to drag his personal from the sport. “You will see, Mr. Le Rachinel is talkative”his lawyer had warned. Actually, no. The 83-year-old outdated gentleman is greater than slightly deaf, responds half-heartedly, and didn’t discover the poles handed to him by his lawyer, who charitably concluded that his consumer “was not in great intellectual shape”.

Fernand Le Rachinel is the occasion’s historic printer and till 2008, a member of the political bureau; he is an effective buddy of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who bought him elected twice to the European Parliament, from 1994 to 1999, then particularly from 2004 to 2009, a interval which earned him a courtroom sentence in 2025 of two years in jail, a effective of 15,000 euros and three years of ineligibility.

He arrived in Strasbourg in November 1994, and took the place of Chantal Simonot, who had solely been introduced within the elections to respect parity. The new deputy indicators instantly, on 1^er November, a fictitious parliamentary help contract with Micheline Bruna, the boss’s non-public secretary in his Hauts-de-Seine stronghold, in Montretout, and a second, equally obscure one in January 2005 with Thierry Légier, the president’s bodyguard. “They did not work for me, it was Jean-Marie Le Pen who determined, agrees the previous MP. I used to be not concerned in recruitment. »

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