The 2017 campaign accounts of presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon have resurfaced. Insoumise (LFI) MP for Paris Sophia Chikirou arrived at the Paris court on Tuesday morning for a possible indictment regarding this investigation.
Opened in April 2018, it concerns the offences of fraud and attempted aggravated fraud, forgery and use of forgery and illegal loan of manpower. The courts suspect Mediascop, Sophia Chikirou’s communications consultancy, of having overcharged for certain services during the campaign, which the 45-year-old elected official denies.
Ms Chikirou had already been heard in a two-day free hearing in October 2018 in Nanterre by the anti-corruption police (OCLCIFF). “There was no overcharging, Mediascop did not overcharge, there was no personal enrichment, there was no misappropriation of public funds,” she dismissed a few days later.
In 2018, the National Commission for Campaign Accounts and Political Financing (CNCCFP) and then the French financial intelligence unit Tracfin sent reports to the Paris prosecutor’s office, which opened a preliminary investigation, entrusted to judges in November of the same year.
LFI defends itself
In the meantime, spectacular searches, particularly because part of them were broadcast live on Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Facebook page, had been carried out at the party’s headquarters, at the home of the rebellious leader and many of his collaborators, triggering the ire of the radical left party.
Although the investigating judges initially appeared to dismiss the main accusations in the case, they finally indicted in September 2021 the LFI MP for Seine-Saint-Denis Bastien Lachaud, employed in 2017 as treasurer of the association, for “illegal loan of manpower, forgery, fraud and attempted fraud”.
Then in February 2022, the Ere du Peuple, an associative structure, was indicted for “fraud and attempted aggravated fraud” and “forgery and use of forgery”.
At the end of her interrogation, the investigating judges can indict Ms Chikirou, place her under the more favourable status of assisted witness or not bring charges against her.