Marine Le Pen, January 29, 2021 in Paris. – AFP
Overwhelmed by an article from Sunday newspaper on the conclusions of the investigation on the suspicions of fictitious jobs of MEPs assistants of the National Rally, Marine Le Pen denounced, this Sunday, a political maneuver, affirming that the subject arose “in each election”.
” The JDD, official organ of Macronist power, emerges the same endless affair of parliamentary assistants, as in each election, “wrote Marine Le Pen on Twitter this Sunday, referring to the regional elections in June.
The JDD, an official organ of Macronist power, emerges the same endless affair of parliamentary assistants, as in each election.
Nothing new under the sun, except maybe some good polls in sight? MLP https://t.co/MkFLckbIsq
– Marine Le Pen (@MLP_officiel) May 16, 2021
“A fraudulent organized system”
In today’s edition, the Sunday newspaper affirmed having had access to the report of the police officers of the Central Office for the fight against corruption and financial and fiscal offenses in charge of the investigation into the suspicions of fictitious employment of parliamentary assistants of the RN. According to our colleagues, in this report, the investigators believe that the National Front (FN) has “set up a fraudulent organized system”.
The FN “through its executives and leaders, set up a fraudulent organized system of embezzlement of European funds for its benefit, through fictitious jobs of parliamentary assistants”, we can read in the report according to the JDD. The JDD also affirms that the report contains several depositions contributing to “present Marine Le Pen as the direct responsible” of this fraudulent system.
A loss of 6.8 million euros
Nearly 25 elected officials and assistants, including Marine Le Pen, her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen and senior party officials, were indicted for “embezzlement of public funds” in this investigation, opened in 2015 and entrusted to financial examining magistrates of the Paris court in 2016. Justice suspects the leaders of the party of having set up “in a concerted and deliberate manner” a “system of diversion” of the envelopes allocated by the EU to each deputy to remunerate parliamentary staff. The latter would not have worked for MEPs, but for the party, allowing the FN to save money.
For Marine Le Pen’s lawyer, Rodolphe Bosselut, the president of the party “has never set up a fraudulent system”. “All the parliamentary assistants to the European Parliament mentioned in the instruction have worked at one time or another,” he insisted on JDD. The European Parliament, civil party, estimated his loss at 6.8 million euros in this case.