This Thursday, Mediapart accuses Patricia Mirallès (LREM), MP for the first constituency of Hérault, of having used the envelope reserved for mandate costs for “personal expenses”. This information, denied by the elected, is published a few days after Coralie Dubost (LREM), deputy for a neighboring constituency, announced that she was stopping politics, after similar revelations.
The news site notably criticizes the Montpellier elected official for having dipped into her advance for mandate expenses to “accommodate her family at the hotel when her son moved to Limoges, more than 400 km from her constituency, in September 2019”, for around 219 euros, and, a month earlier, to accommodate your spouse at the hotel, for 352 euros, during a trip to commemorate the landing in Provence.
MP denies accusations
Mediapart also indicates that the Hérault deputy would have used this money “to pay a computer bill of 1,198.80 euros for her daughter, then a student, who absolutely wanted to recover the data from her broken down hard drive”.
In a statement, Patricia Mirallès refutes these accusations, evoking “a witch hunt”. “These accusations are slanderous, based on absolutely nothing tangible, only lies (…) which simply aim to destroy my image”. According to the elected official, “the expense mentioned in Limoges in 2019 was indeed paid with my personal money, and the computer repair was for the hard drive that I use in my office to store my mandate data”.
The member says she is controlled, like the other elected members of the National Assembly, and has not been the subject of “any particular report from the Ethics department concerning the use of [ses] mandate fees, to which [elle fait] naturally pay attention”. “Each of the expenses incurred within the framework of my mandate is checked to the nearest penny, and no irregularity has been noted in this respect”, continues the municipal councilor of Montpellier. Patricia Mirallès specifies that she reserves “the right to [se] defend “.