Madame Le Pen and a secret Swiss bank account

JanyJany Le Pen, the wife of Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, has herself held a secret Swiss bank account, according to information obtained by Mediapart. This follows revelations that Jean-Marie Le Pen had a bank account opened for him at UBS bank in Switzerland in the 1980s and was the economic beneficiary of a Swiss-based trust held in his butler's name which had an account at HSBC bank. Mediapart also understands that the special prosecutor's office for financial fraud, the Parquet National Financier (PNF), has now taken over the investigation into the claims that Jean-Marie Le Pen has hidden financial assets in Switzerland over the years. Le Pen himself has said little publicly about the allegations, and has not denied the revelations concerning the trust. “I don't have to explain myself over what anyone says about me, in particular para-police organs in charge of spreading disruption among the political classes,” he commented last month.

The latest revelation concerns 82-year-old Jany Le Pen, Jean-Marie Le Pen's wife of 24 years. The French ministry of finance's anti-money laundering unit Tracfin alerted the prosecution authorities that Jany Le Pen held assets at Credit Suisse in Switzerland via a small wealth management company based in Geneva called Prium Finances. In 2008 some 200,000 euros were transferred to a bank account with the Société Générale bank in France and the Swiss account closed. Jany Le Pen did not respond to Mediapart's requests for a comment on the claims. Contacted by Mediapart, one of the three men behind Prium Finances, Laurent Hebert, said that he had not been aware that Madame Le Pen, née Jany Paschos, had been among his clients. “If I had known I would obviously not have taken her on. We are very aware about avoiding risky profiles, and that includes public figures,” he said.

The claims throw into the spotlight a woman who has generally remained in the background since she first met Jean-Marie Le Pen back in 1984. The pair were introduced to each other at a barbecue by the eldest of Le Pen's three daughters by his first marriage, Marie-Caroline Le Pen, and a journalist from Le Figaro Magazine. At the time Jany Paschos had just divorced her Belgian businessman husband, Jean Garnier, while Jean-Marie Le Pen was facing life after the abrupt departure of his wife Pierrette Lalanne, the mother of his daughters. In 1991, four years after Le Pen's highly-publicised divorce came through, he and Jany married and lived in his villa at Rueil-Malmaison in the western suburbs of Paris.
Jeanine – her real first name - Paschos was born in Nice, the daughter of a Greek art dealer father and a Franco-Dutch mother. Jany Paschos, as she herself has often stated, has “never worked”. In her first marriage to Jean Garnier she was “spoilt”, she admitted to Le Monde. “I had a husband who loved travelling, a month and a half in the winter, a month and a half in the summer. It was very jet set...”

Though Jany Le Pen has always been appreciated by FN party officials, who still talk of her “heart of gold”, she has enjoyed rather stormier relations with her husband's three daughters, and in particular the current FN president Marine Le Pen. “Marine Le Pen did not behave very well towards her,” says Fernand Le Rachinel.

An indication of these uneasy relations came on May 10th this year, at the heart of the very public row between Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen over his comments about the Holocaust which eventually led to the FN's founder having his party membership suspended. Jany Le Pen agreed to take part that day in the annual gathering of far-right and extreme-right groups in France to honour Joan of Arc. The Front National itself had always attended this gathering until 1988, when it switched to holding its own rallies on May 1st. Jany Le Pen, representing her husband, was greeted with acclaim by some of the 300 or so participants and told them: “Thank you for this modest ovation, I know who it's aimed at … let's forget the other slightly failed celebrations.” It was a clear and critical reference to Marine Le Pen and her speech at the official Front National rally on May 1st. However, one person who does enjoy Jany Le Pen's complete confidence and loyalty is Jean-Marie Le Pen's butler Gérald Gérin, in whose name a trust was formed with an HSBC bank account in Switzerland. “He is really loyal, he would die for them,” says Fernand Le Rachinel.

The appearance at the political gathering on May 10th was something of an exception for Jany Le Pen as she usually stays “quite discreet” and remains “in the background, politically”, according to the FN's former secretary general Carl Lang. “She has no political influence at all on Jean-Marie Le Pen, she's not involved in the party life, is not present at Front meetings, just at the [party] conference and the Blue-White-Red event [editor's note, the Fête des Bleu-Blanc-Rouge was an annual social gathering of FN supporters that took place until 2007],” he says. “She is Jean-Marie Le Pen's wife, her role is to be there but all that she does is done in order to please him. She doesn't drive anything. She doesn't do anything other than what Le Pen tells her to do.” Fernand Le Rachinel confirms this observation. “She's an obedient woman who does what Jean-Marie Le Pen asks,” he says.

Jany Le Pen has herself always denied playing any political role, describing herself recently as “someone very simple, who lives very naturally, with [my] animals, [my] garden, [my] flowers”. She was, she said, “simply a housewife” who “loves pretty things, nice friends, reading good books” and who “doesn't want power”.

Nonetheless Jean-Marie Le Pen's wife has been thrust into the political spotlight by her husband on two occasions. The first occasion was in 1995 when she set up SOS-Enfants d'Irak, a charity aimed at helping children in Iraq which was closely linked to the Front National and was launched with the support of Iraq's then-deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz. The Saddam Hussein regime in Baghdad rolled out the red carpet for the wife of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who twice opposed Western military intervention in the Middle Eastern state.

The association was set up with Jean-Michel Dubois and Bernard Antony who at the time was the leader of the Catholic traditionalist movement inside the Front National. Georges Paschos, former head of the French subsidiary of Citibank, who died in 2008, was its treasurer. “Georges was completely outside the Front structure,” says Carl Lang. “He attended the Bleu-Blanc-Rouge, at the SOS-Enfants d'Irak stand. He was at the Le Pens' home very often, particularly on Sunday afternoons.”

'Le Pen is a very secretive man'

The official aim of the association was to criticise the harmful effects of the United Nations' sanctions on Iraq and to help the “poor children of Iraq”. Carl Lang notes: “We never had details about what went on in Iraq.” Questioned by L'Express news magazine in 2004, Jany Le Pen defended the “purely humanitarian” nature of her charity, and insisted that “not a bean escaped [my] brother, Georges Paschos, the treasurer. He was a real stickler who hadn't been a banker for nothing.”

Jean-Michel Dubois said the same when interviewed back in 2004. “We were whiter than white. In Baghdad the people we dealt with suggested that we perform as [financial] brokers to boost the charity's funds. I always refused. I even wound up my Franco-Iraqi chamber of commerce to prevent any unfounded accusations,” he added, pointing to the “three ambulances” delivered to the Iraqi ministry of health by the charity as well as “40,000 dollars aimed at refurbishing a paediatric hospital”.

However, the former president of SOS-Enfants d'Irak, Marie Lussan, quit the association criticising Dubois's “wheeling and dealing”. Lussan, whose mother is half-Italian and half-Tunisian, told L'Express in 2004: “Jany has a good heart and charm, but [Dubois] used me for his business, to the point where he burnt his bridges with some Iraqis. I also did all I could to block his path. I was the front, the Arab guarantor.” The former president of the charity also highlighted the chaotic way contributions were handled and the “manoeuvring” by Jany Le Pen to replace her as the main person dealing with Tariq Aziz.

The charity proved useful as a support mechanism for Jean-Marie Le Pen in Iraq. The founder of the FN met Saddam Hussein twice, in 1990 and in 1996. Between 1995 and 2003 Jany Le Pen herself visited Baghdad on around ten occasions. Indeed, Jean-Marie Le Pen's wife seems to have left a favourable impression with her Iraqi hosts, right up to May 2002 when Le Pen was a candidate in that month's French presidential elections. “If, by chance, Le Pen were to win it, trust his wife: it's she who gives the impression of handling his affairs” an Iraqi official was quoted as saying in Le Monde.

At the same time Jany Le Pen became the standard-bearer for a variety of different animal associations or social charities linked to the FN, such as Fraternité française or Action sociale et populaire (ASP), which was presided over by her friend Jean-Pierre Blanchard, a Protestant pastor who acted as the “moral guarantor” for the Front National's social policies.

Jany Le Pen was thrust into the limelight for a second time in 1999. The then-president of the FN had been declared ineligible for public office for two years for jostling and verbally abusing socialist politician Annette Peulvast-Bergeal during parliamentary elections in 1997. Fearing he would not be able to stand at the 1999 European elections, Jean-Marie Le Pen put forward his wife Jany to replace him as head of the party list. “If it has to be done, I will find the courage and I will go into battle,” she declared, adding that she was “proud to be able to contribute to putting right the injustice done to my husband”.

“Jany wasn't keen at all, it was Jean-Marie,” recalls Carl Lang. “It was one of the factors that triggered the war with Bruno Mégret.” Bruno Mégret was a senior figure in the Front National whom some saw as a rival to the leadership. By playing the 'Jany card' and putting his wife forward as head of the list Jean-Marie Le Pen was in effect trying to sound out what Mégret's intentions were. The move triggered an angry reaction from Mégret and led to a split bewteen the two men and their followers, with Mégret and his allies eventually being expelled from the party. In the end Le Pen himself stood as head of the FN list, having got his disqualification reduced to a year on appeal.

But for most of her marriage with Le Pen, Jany Le Pen has led a “social, society life” says Carl Lang. “She has always had a certain standard of living, including before her marriage to Le Pen, she has her villa, her Rolls. They played host to a lot of people at Rueil, but relatively few senior FN officials. We were the Front National, that was one part of Le Pen's life, but you don't mix apples and pears. Le Pen is a very secretive man, who compartmentalises a lot, especially when it comes to the area of finances.”

One of Jany's long-standing friends who used to come to dinner was Brigitte Bardot, whose lawyer from St Tropez, Jean-Louis Bouguereau, is a regional councillor for the FN in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region in the south of France. Another close acquaintance is Fréderic Chatillon, former head of the extreme-right student group the Groupe Union Défense (GUD) and an old friend of Marine Le Pen, and who is today under formal judicial investigation over the funding of the FN. For example, he was with Jean-Marie and Jany Le Pen in December 2006 at the Zenith arena in Paris for a show by the anti-Semitic comedian Dieudonné. On that evening the arena's VIP area was packed with FN supporters and officials, including Bruno Gollnisch, Jean-Michel Dubois and Farid Smahi.

Two years later Jean-Marie and Jany Le Pen were once again at the arena when the comedian awarded the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson a prize for “distastefulness and insolence”, an award brought on stage by a person dressed as a deported Jew. Jany Le Pen knows Dieudonné well. When the comic went to the Bleu-Blanc-Rouge event in 2006, he made a beeline to her charity's stand. In March 2007 the two flew together to Cameroon for an official trip aimed at getting Jean-Marie Le Pen's policies known in Africa and drawing attention to the plight of the Pygmies, who are threatened by deforestation. Jean-Michel Dubois was also present on that trip.

Among Jany Le Pen's other controversial acquaintances is Alain Escada, the Belgian president of the fundamentalist Catholic movement Civitas. She has appeared alongside him twice in recent months. One occasion was the May 10th parade, while the other was on the podium at his gathering in September 2014 to support Christians in the Middle East, for which she also made a video urging people to attend.

Speaking on the far-right web-based television channel TV Libertés in December, Jany Le Pen said: “Monsieur Escada is very, very good, he does all he can … Me, symbolically in the end, the sole thing that I can bring is the name which, fortunately, contributes something, my husband's name.”

----------------------------------------------------------------

• The French version of this article can be found here.

 English version by Michael Streeter