The media pressure had become unbearable. The deputy of La République en Marche (LRM) Coralie Dubost will not represent herself in the 3and constituency of Hérault, she announced on Sunday 1er May in a press release broadcast on Twitter. “For the past few days, my person has been the target of unfair attacks, which do a disservice to my political group, the electoral deadlines and more generally democracy. (…) So the time has come for me to withdraw from political life and devote myself to my family. I will not be a candidate for my re-election”, she specifies. The deputy vice-president of the LRM group in the National Assembly had been walled in silence for forty-eight hours, after being implicated according to a survey of Mediapart for the mismanagement of its mandate expenses and its parliamentary teams.
The online media had exposed the expenses of the deputy of the presidential majority: in 2018, she had made up to more than 3,000 euros in lingerie and clothing expenses, in particular with her advance on mandate expenses, supposed to cover the expenses. related to the exercise of his office and limited to 5,733 euros per month. The MP, who did not respond to requests of the worldjustified itself to by Mediapart explaining : “there are mandate outfits and personal outfits (…), I do not put the same business in my personal life and in my life of mandate. » At the start of 2019, she ended up taking out a bank loan to cover an overdraft of 7,000 euros. And had since regularly resorted to exceeding ceilings and requests for additional loans to ensure his lifestyle, according to a confidential report submitted to the National Assembly.
Lawyer by profession, M.me Dubost declared to Mediapart to have regularized her situation, in the wake of a control by the ethics officer of the National Assembly for the years 2018 and 2019. She also accused her collaborator at the time of being responsible for this situation. “He gave me bad advice, I was stupid (…)I am not a cheater”, she defended herself. Since 2017 and the reform of mandate fees, MPs have been randomly checked at least once during their mandate.
It is first of all a report of five former collaborators (out of the 15 who worked with her during her mandate) in the spring of 2021, with the anti-harassment unit of the National Assembly, which made the ethics officer took over this case. According to its employees and their remarks transcribed in the report sent to the ethics officer, Mme Dubost would have asked them to ” to watch [son] House staff » or even“to do household chores [à son] residence “, which the hon. member denied.
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