French far-right figurehead Marine Le Pen and 26 other people will stand trial on September 30th accused of a vast fraud in which staff of her Rassemblement National party were paid out of European Parliament funds allocated for parliamentary assistants. Now the party chairman, Jordan Bardella, its candidate for prime minister in recent and future elections, has been accused of also taking part in the alleged scam.
The embezzlement charge concerns the period 2012-2017, when the Rassemblement National was still called the Front National. The prosecution case is that the party’s Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) would hire as parliamentary assistants people who were in fact working for the party in France, but paid by the EU parliament. The alleged fraud was estimated in 2018 to have cost the European Parliament a total of 6.8 million euros.
In a book to be published on Friday, extracts of which were revealed on Monday, a journalist with the French daily Libération alleges that Bardella was fraudulently hired in 2015 as a parliamentary assistant for a Front National MEP, and that party members later fabricated supposed evidence of the veracity of his work to protect him from the judicial investigation into the alleged embezzlement, which was opened in France in 2015.
The RN chairman, who is now himself an MEP, swiftly refuted what he called “false and defamatory” accusations, and threatened to sue Berteloot for defamation. “Neither the European Parliament nor the French justice system found anything to question concerning the reality of my work”, Bardella wrote on X (the former Twitter). “No-one will be fooled by this crude destabilisation attempt, just a few days before the opening of the parliamentary assistant trial targeting the RN.”
In 2015, at the age of 19, Bardella took up a temporary post as parliamentary assistant for Jean-François Jalkh, then a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the Front National – the party which was renamed as the Rassemblement National in 2018. Bardella’s contract was for part-time work, lasting four and a half months between February and June 2015. He was paid a net sum of 1,200 euros per month.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
While his name does appear in the case file of the French investigation into the suspected fake jobs scam, Bardella has never been a target of the probe nor been questioned by investigators. Nor was he investigated by the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF), a European Union (EU) agency which has in the past accused Front National MEPs of the fraudulent use of EU funds.
During the French judicial probe, detectives from the specialist police anti-corruption branch OCLCIFF studied the activities of around 100 parliamentary assistants of Front National MEPs, and notably those who also featured on its organization chart. Among the latter was Jordan Bardella who, as well as being a parliamentary assistant to Front National MEP Jean-François Jalkh, also worked on missions for the party’s then deputy chairman Florian Philippot. Bardella was also the party’s secretary for the Seine-Saint-Denis département (county) that makes up the north-eastern suburbs of Paris, and in March 2015 was a candidate for a seat on the Seine-Saint-Denis council.
A number of documents were presented to investigators as proof that Bardella did work as a parliamentary assistant to Jalkh, including press reviews with handwritten comments, a 2015 diary which contained notes on events that Jalkh was involved in as an MEP, as well as mention of trips to Brussels and plenary sessions of the European Parliament. Those documents and the fact that Bardella’s part-time contract allowed him to engage in other work appears to have convinced the probe that there was no case to pursue against him.
But in his book La Machine à gagner, which goes on sale from September 13th, Libération journalist Tristan Berteloot alleges that the documents presented to investigators were fabricated by Front National staff at the end of 2017 to protect Bardella, who that year became the far-right party’s spokesman and who was about to join its national bureau.
Creating a “Jordan Bardella dossier”
Berteloot cites a discussion on Messenger between former Front National members in 2018. One of them, identified only as “Paul D”, who is presented as once an intern of Jalkh’s, allegedly said he “created false files for assistants who never worked for the European Parliament”. A Belgian lawyer, Ghislain Dubois, who at the time was parliamentary assistant to Jalkh and in charge of organising the party’s riposte to the embezzlement probe, allegedly told intern Paul D to create the “Jordan Bardella dossier”, according to Berteloot.
Berteloot also refers to an email addressed to Paul D, entitled “Little job on Wednesday and Thursday” and dated December 20th 2017, in which Ghislain Dubois allegedly wrote: “Cooee! Jean-François asks me to hand the following mission to you, if you will. The aim is important: setting up the dossier of Jordan Bardella.” Dubois allegedly asked the young intern (who he had reportedly recommended to Jalkh) to go onto the website Global Factiva – which is used by the European Parliament – to “fabricate a regional press review covering the period of the contract” of Bardella as parliamentary assistant. The date of Paul D’s visit to the site and the digital signature which automatically appears at the bottom of the created documents were blanked out with a corrector, reported Berteloot.
The journalist also alleges that a false 2015 diary of Bardella’s was fabricated, in which were inserted “a few events linked to Jalkh’s mandate, dates of plenary gatherings, trips to Brussels”.
Jordan Bardella did not reply to questions submitted to him by Mediapart about the veracity of the press reviews and diary.
Jean-François Jalkh could not be interviewed, because of what has been described as his “serious” deterioration of his health following a stroke, and which is the reason that he will not attend the trial that opens later this month, in which the charges against him concern his employment of Jeanne Pavard as parliamentary assistant, and his own period as a parliamentary assistant to Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, the father of Marine Le Pen.
But according to the weekly magazine Challenges, in a statement he gave to the judicial investigation on July 6th 2021 about his recruitment of Bardella, Jalkh said: “He wanted to initiate himself a little with the work at the European Parliament. I even proposed, in the first instance, that he be an intern for six months, but to him that seemed too long. […] He did two things. An initiation into how the European Parliament works. […] He did the press review for the Great East region [of France].”
“I have all the supporting evidence of the work he did,” Jalkh told the magistrates. When asked how it can be proven that it was indeed Bardella who drew up the documents and diary in question, Jalkh replied that, “They are initialled by his hand”.
Ghislain Dubois did not reply to Mediapart’s attempts to contact him. Paul D, who Mediapart was unable to contact, told Libération that he “didn’t think” that he took part in fabricating evidence for the parliamentary assistants. “I have nothing else to say,” he added. “I did my work as an intern.”
Speaking to French news magazine Le Nouvel Obs on Monday, Marine Le Pen denounced what she called “false accusations” and an “attempted political destabilisation”, adding that Bardella’s contract as parliamentary assistant to Jalkh “has never been regarded, neither by the [French] justice system, nor the [European] Parliament, nor by OLAF, as liable to pose the slightest problem”.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse