The European Union’s anti-fraud body has accused Marin Le Pen and several members of her party – including her father – of embezzling about 620,000 euros while they were members of the European Parliament.
The French investigative website Mediapart published a section of the new report of 116, which alleges that MEPs misused EU funds for national party purposes.
The allegations come a week before the second round of the presidential election, on April 24, in which Le Pen will face Emmanuel Macron.
A spokesman for the far-right National Assembly (National Rally) party, Le Pen, questioned the timing of the allegations. Le Pen’s lawyer, Rodolphe Boselyut, told AFP that he was “frightened by the way Olaf [the European anti-fraud office] acts ”. He insisted that part of the report concerned “old facts, more than 10 years old”.
“Marin Le Pen disputes this. She disputed it without having access to the details of the charge. This is manipulation; “Unfortunately, I’m not surprised,” Boselut told France’s BFMTV.
According to Mediapart, Olaf sent the report to French investigators in March. He accused Le Pen of personally diverting almost 137,000 euros from EU funds during her time as MEP between 2004 and 2017. Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen; Luis Aliot, her former partner and former vice president of RN, who is now mayor of Perpignan; and Bruno Golnis, another party heavyweight, were also cited in the report as money launderers. All denied any wrongdoing.
In an incident reported by Mediapart, Marin Le Pen claimed in 2010 a € 5,000 lawsuit for hotel rooms for 13 members of the far-right party to take part in a conference entitled European Regions and the Financial Crisis. However, one participant said he had written to the European Parliament and said the meeting had been used to discuss the party’s presidency. An unnamed participant told investigators that Le Pen hung a European flag on the road in order to take pictures, and then ordered his colleagues to “put this shit away.”
The prosecutor’s office in Paris said the file was “under review”.
None of those mentioned in the report are accused of personal gain, but of asking for EU funds to pay for RN’s staff and events – formerly Front National (FN). Le Pen said she did not know she had done something wrong.
Le Pen has been under investigation since 2018 on charges of “breach of trust” and “misuse of public funds” for alleged use of EU money by European parliamentarians to finance the salaries of party officials. That same year, an EU court ruled that the bloc could recover more than 41,000 euros in public money that Le Pen used to pay his bodyguard, a former paratrooper who has been guarding her father for 20 years.
Boselut said that Le Pen “had not been summoned by any French judicial authority” and accused the European authorities of not sending the final report to him or Le Pen.
He said Olaf’s investigation began in 2016 and Le Pen was questioned in writing by mail in March 2021.
The latest poll, published by Ipsos for FranceInfo and Le Parisien, suggests that Macron could win the runoff next week by 10 percentage points.
Both candidates are trying to attract supporters of the radical left-wing candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon, who struggled to qualify for the second round. On Sunday, Melenchon published the results of a consultation with 310,000 paid supporters on how the 7.7 million people who voted for him last week will vote next Sunday. Of the more than 215,000 who took part, almost 38% said they would vote empty-handed, while 33.4% said they would vote for Macron, and just under 29% said they would abstain.
“The result of this consultation is not an instruction for anyone. It lists the opinions of 215,292 people who participated. “Everyone will conclude and vote according to their own conscience,” the Melenchon campaign team said in a statement.
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