A high-risk trial for the French far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party and its former president, Marine Le Pen, a former presidential candidate, opened on September 30 at the Paris Criminal Court.
Twenty-seven people from the party, including the RN as a legal entity, are due to appear on charges of embezzlement of public funds, complicity, and concealment in the so-called case of the parliamentary assistants at the European Parliament.
The case of assistants employed by the far-right in the European Parliament represents a very high risk. The prosecution is targeting Marine Le Pen on two fronts: her role as an MEP and her role as the party president during that period. She risks being ineligible, according to Mediapart.
These facts entail ten years’ imprisonment, a fine of one million euros, and the additional penalty of ineligibility.
In his initial denunciation, in March 2015, European Parliament President Martin Schulz reported an annual loss of 1.5 million euros for his institution, targeting twenty contracts for assistants to sixteen RN MEPs who were actually working at the party’s headquarters.
During the judicial investigation, the European Parliament reduced its loss to 3.2 million euros for the entire period concerned, from 2004 to 2016—a sum from which 1.1 million had already been reimbursed before the trial.
The Parisian examining magistrates and police officers from the Central Office for Combating Corruption and Financial and Tax Offences (OCLCIFF) investigated the European assistants’ contracts and the work they carried out. Their investigations show that the RN deliberately made substantial savings on the back of the European Parliament by having MEPs pay the salaries of several of its permanent staff.
The RN, which is highly critical of EU institutions, profited from the windfall, with each MEP being able to spend up to 24,164 euros a month on assistants. In practice, it was the party itself that allocated the posts according to its own needs.
For example, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s personal bodyguard and then Marine Le Pen worked as parliamentary assistants for several MEPs between 2005 and 2012. Yann Le Pen, the elder sister of Marine Le Pen, served as a parliamentary assistant to several MEPs from 2009 to 2014, first in the “events unit” at party headquarters and later in the “major events” delegation.
Between 2004 and 2014, Jean-François Jalkh, successively regional councillor, national election secretary, and party delegate general, personally benefited from several parliamentary assistant contracts. The same goes for Jean-Marie Le Pen, who served as his chief of staff, secretary, and handyman, or as a special adviser and assistant to Marine Le Pen, or as a party graphic designer, among other roles.
In all, eleven former MEPs (including Louis Aliot and Bruno Gollnisch) and twelve former assistants will be on trial alongside the RN leaders.
The fact that investigators found no chance to tinker with the fraud worries RN leaders. “It emerges from the investigations that the Front National, through the intermediary of its executives and leaders, set up an organized fraudulent system of misappropriation of European funds for its own benefit by means of fictitious employment of parliamentary assistants,” write OCLCIFF police officers in a summary report dated February 2021.
“Various elements point to the setting up of a fraudulent system initially intended to finance jobs attached to people close to Jean-Marie Le Pen, then president of the FN, and which gradually benefitted the FN more generally, now the RN,” the investigating judges wrote in their order for referral to the court (a document to which Mediapart has had access).
Marine Le Pen’s involvement in the trial is twofold: she is both an MEP, i.e., an employer of assistants, and the party’s president. The investigators claim that she used these contracts to pay her personal assistant at party headquarters, her father Jean-Marie Le Pen’s chief of staff, and his bodyguard.
In addition, several witnesses, as well as e-mails and SMS messages seized during the judicial investigation, attest that Marine Le Pen ordered and supervised the system. She “had real impetus and decision-making power over the principle of recruitment, the assignment of a collaborator to the envelope of a particular MP, bonuses, and this independently of the European MP to whom the parliamentary assistant was theoretically assigned,” the investigating judges wrote, according to Mediapart.
Some witnesses also pointed out that the former RN president was “the main decision-maker in the end” and that she “supervised the use of the funds.”.
In its defense, the RN, which also had ties to the Kremlin and received a loan from a bank linked to Russia in 2016, denied any fictitious employment or fraudulent scheme, raised the spectre of a “political plot” and “settling of scores.”
