Marine Le Pen and some of her relatives are accused of having embezzled around 600,000 euros of European public money.
Marine Le Pen (RN) and her relatives are accused by the European Anti-Fraud Office (Olaf) of having embezzled around 600,000 euros of European public money during their mandates as MEPs, according to a new report revealed on Saturday by Mediapart and handed over to French justice. Asked by AFP, the Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed that it had received this report on March 11, which is currently being analyzed.
“Marine Le Pen disputes it. She disputes without having access to the report, without having access to the indictments. It is an instrumentalization, but unfortunately I am not surprised”, denounced her lawyer, Me Rodolphe Bosselut on BFMTV.
According to him, Olaf’s investigation has been open since 2016 and Marine Le Pen was questioned by mail in March 2021. He denounced an investigation “not very compliant with the most essential and basic rules of the law of the defense”.
600,000 euros misappropriated?
Olaf’s new report, of which Mediapart publishes extracts, concerns the fees that political groups can use in the context of their mandate as MEPs and that Marine Le Pen and her relatives would have used for national political purposes, for personal expenses or for benefits for the benefit of commercial companies close to the National Rally and the far-right parliamentary group Europe des nations et des libertés (ENL).
Olaf implicates Marine Le Pen, the ENL and three other former MEPs: his father Jean-Marie Le Pen, his former companion Louis Aliot and Bruno Gollnisch, member of the national office of the RN. The office accuses them of having embezzled around 600,000 euros, of which it recommends reimbursement. According to the report, the candidate of the National Rally would have personally embezzled around 137,000 euros of public money from the Parliament of Strasbourg when she was an MEP between 2004 and 2017.
Since June 2017, Marine Le Pen has also been prosecuted in the investigation carried out in Paris on suspicion of fictitious jobs in the European Parliament of party assistants. She is indicted for “embezzlement of public funds” and “complicity” in this offense as part of this judicial investigation.