Marine Le Pen and 26 other elected officials or executives of the National Rally will appear in court from September 30 for the case of suspicions of fictitious employment of the party’s assistants in the European Parliament. An update on the case.
The National Rally (RN) faces justice. Marine Le Pen and 26 other elected officials and executives of the far-right party will be tried from September 30 for the affair of fictitious jobs of assistants in the European Parliament. The affair is shaking the party before the start of the trial while new press investigations have been carried out in recent weeks, leading to suspicions of a large-scale scam.
Marine Le Pen, president of the RN (called the National Front before 2018) until 2021, as well as 11 people elected to the European Parliament, 12 parliamentary assistants and 4 party collaborators are referred to the Paris Criminal Court for embezzlement of public funds and complicity in embezzlement of public funds. They are accused of having, between 2004 and 2016, used the funds allocated by the European Parliament to MEPs of the far-right party to finance the operation of the party with the flame. The damage is estimated at nearly 7 million euros.
According to the investigation elements and the testimonies of several witnesses, the RN set up a vast system of fictitious jobs in order to make the funding allocated by the European Parliament profitable. It was in 2014, after Marine Le Pen’s arrival at the head of the party and when the RN went from 3 to 24 elected members in the European Parliament that the affair took on greater proportions. Each member of parliament could then receive an envelope of 23,000 euros per month to finance the recruitment of parliamentary assistants. A financial windfall thanks to which the party, which was experiencing major difficulties at the time and had to repay significant debts, wanted to get back on its feet at a lower cost.
A widespread “system” of fictitious jobs
According to the accusations, during a meeting on 4 June 2014, each of the 24 RN MEPs was ordered to recruit a parliamentary assistant who would be responsible for supporting them in their elected duties and to leave all other parliamentary assistants who could be recruited at the party’s disposal. The said instruction is reported by Nicolas Franchinard, a former parliamentary assistant to three former RN elected officials who testified to Mediapart, and is mentioned by elected officials.
Sophie Montel, who was a member of the European Parliament for the RN from 2014 to 2019, also returned to this instruction from the leadership of the far-right party in her live broadcast published in 2019, Tragic Ball at the National Front. Thirty Years at the Heart of the Le Pen SystemShe quoted a statement from the party leadership: “I inform you that you will have the choice of recruiting an assistant yourself and that the remainder of your parliamentary assistance envelope will be made available to the party.”
Warnings against the illegal nature of this organisation, comparable to a system of fictitious employment, were sent to Marine Le Pen’s office and to the party’s treasurer at the time, Wallerand de Saint-Just, according to emails consulted by Mediapart. Which seemed, according to these same emails, to be aware of the fraudulent aspect of the system. Marine Le Pen has always denied being involved in the management of parliamentary funds and has simply indicated that she was informed of the recruitment carried out by MEPs as well as the centralized management of parliamentary funds supposed, according to the party’s defense, to make the task easier for parliamentarians and assistants.
Suspicions of fictitious jobs broke out in 2015 with the publication of a new RN organisation chart on which appeared about twenty names of parliamentary assistants in positions of responsibility. An accumulation of functions at the origin of suspicions about fictitious jobs which pushed the President of the European Parliament at the time, Martin Schulz, to report the situation. The investigation then began and it turned out that several parliamentary assistants dedicated to parliamentary work did not know the other assistants accumulating a position within the RN as Nicolas Franchinard indicates in Mediapart.
Fake documents to deny accusations of fictitious employment
To counter suspicions about fictitious RN jobs in the European Parliament, documents supposed to prove the effectiveness of the work of parliamentary assistants were provided by certain members of the party, including Jordan Bardella. The journalist from ReleaseTristan Berteloot, returns to these false documents in an investigative book and claims that “to camouflage this fictitious employment, the current president of the RN helped to produce false proof of work”, in particular “a fake diary” and a “backdated press review initialed by his hand”.
The RN president is accused of having fictitious employment and having been paid by the European Parliament while he was working for the party, but he is not being prosecuted in the trial. At the time, he was employed on a part-time fixed-term contract for a monthly salary of 1,200 euros. According to Release, Jordan Bardella was not prosecuted so as “not to add to an already substantial case.”
MEP Nicolas Bay, who is being investigated in the trial that opens on 30 September, also provided documents to the courts to prove his actual work as an MP, as well as that of his assistant at the time, Timothé Toussaint, according to an investigation by Franceinfo and Further investigation. The documents raise certain inconsistencies, particularly related to dates or the highlighting of content and subjects subsequent to the targeted period while the press reviews were presented as elements produced between 2014 and 2015. Nicolas Bay defends himself by assuring that he “never claimed to the courts or to anyone else that these documents, in the form provided to the judge, dated from 2014” and maintains that “there is no false proof of work” reports Franceinfo.