One hundred and ninety-seven pages. No, it is not Marc Levy’s new book, but rather the indictment of the Paris prosecutor’s office, signed on September 18, against the National Rally (RN) in the affair of the “European parliamentary assistants”. It’s starting to go up and you may not be a fan of politics, so let’s summarize: the party is accused of having used certain European parliamentary assistants, paid with parliamentary funds, to carry out work solely for the RN, with no connection with Europe.
So certainly, this indictment will sell less than the beach novel to which it was compared, but its effect is not zero: 27 people linked to the RN are referred to the criminal court. The period covered concerns the two terms of office 2009-2014 and 2014-2019 and the civil party, none other than the European Parliament itself, estimates the damage at 6.8 million euros.
Hard to understand the European Parliament
According to the latest hearings of Marine Le Pen, collected by our colleagues at Releasein April and June 2019, the party leader recognized for the first time a “good year of uncertainty” for the new elected officials labeled FN in the European Parliament in 2014, arguing that it takes “five years to master the work of a European Member of Parliament”, which, according to her, clearly justifies the fact that for a year, parliamentary assistants worked little in Parliament.
Another admission from Marine Le Pen, the party treasurer “was very happy to reduce his payroll by seeing deputies come to look for people in his pool who would become their parliamentary assistants”. Not sure that this will be convincing for the judges.