The ethics officer of the National Assembly pinned Grégoire de Fournas on Thursday for “ethical breach”, after the elected RN promoted his wine on his deputy Twitter account, we learned from a parliamentary source. The chosen one is indeed a winegrower in the Médoc, in Gironde.
“Many people have contacted me to order me wine,” he wrote Wednesday, mentioning a site and thanking for the “support”, a message since deleted. The President of the Assembly Yaël Braun-Pivet had seized the ethics officer.
“Promotion of a private interest”
The ethics officer Christophe Pallez judged that the deputy “promoted a private interest (the company of his parents of which he was an employee) as part of his function”, the Twitter account used being the account he reference on the site of the Assembly, according to the same parliamentary source. He wrote to Grégoire de Fournas to inform him of this breach and recommend that he “no longer use this account or any other medium claiming his status as a deputy for such activities”.
If the recommendation was not followed, the office of the Assembly, its highest collegiate body, could be seized and impose a disciplinary penalty. At the beginning of November, Grégoire de Fournas was excluded for fifteen days from the Palais Bourbon after his remarks, “that he return to Africa”, launched in session. The deputy of Gironde had then denied any racist character, assuring to speak of the humanitarian boat Ocean Viking then blocked at sea with 234 migrants, and not of Carlos Martens Bilongo, elected black of Val-d’Oise.