The Front National's honorary president, Jean-Marie Le Pen, held a hidden Swiss bank account via a trust overseen by his butler, Gerald Gérin, Mediapart can reveal. The account, held first at HSBC then at the Compagnie bancaire helvétique (CBH), contained 2.2 million euros, of which 1.7 million was in the form of gold ingots and coins.
Mediapart understands that the prosecution authorities at Nanterre, west of Paris, were handed details of the trust and bank account by the French anti-money laundering organisation Tracfin, which is part of the French ministry of finance. They were shown a document dating from 2008 in which Le Pen's butler, Gérald Gérin, who is today also an FN politician, accepts that he was the legal beneficiary of the trust. Jean-Marie Le Pen himself is believed to have been the economic beneficiary of that trust. It has also emerged that in the same year, 2008, Jean-Marie Le Pen's wife Jany Le Pen closed a personal account at the bank Crédit Suisse. These fresh revelations could mean that Jean-Marie Le Pen faces action for failing to make a full disclosure of his estate to financial watchdogs, and possibly for tax fraud.
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Neither Jean-Marie Le Pen nor Jany Le Pen responded to Mediapart's request for comment.
In 2008 their butler, Gerald Gérin, had become the legal beneficiary of a trust based in the British Virgin Islands (BVI), Balerton Marketing Limited. This structure, which was managed from Geneva in Switzerland by commercial lawyer Marc Bonnant, had an account at the HSBC bank until May 2014. At that time the HSBC account was apparently closed and the funds transferred to the Bahamas, to an account opened with the Compagnie bancaire helvétique (CBH).
Contacted by Mediapart, Marc Bonnant said he had never run “any account for M. Jean-Marie Le Pen” but when asked about Gérald Gérin, he said he was bound by professional confidentiality rules and could not make any comment. Gérin told Mediapart he was not a beneficiary of the trust and said he would be “asking for explanations” from Jean-Marie Le Pen and Marc Bonnant.
Gérin, 41, trained in the bar and hotel industry in Marseille and was for a while a barman at the Carlton Hotel in Nice in southern France before becoming the butler to Jean-Marie Le Pen's family at the age of 20. Gérin later entered politics himself, standing unsuccessfully in the 2007 Parliamentary elections at Vitrolles, a suburb of Aix-en-Provence. At the time a profile of him in L'Express news magazine stated that Gérin “even had the [right of] signature” on Jean-Marie Le Pen's bank accounts.
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The butler was later elected to the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur (PACA) regional council in the south of France in 2010, was a Parliamentary candidate in the Bouches-du-Rhône in the south of France in 2012, and became Euro MP Jean-Marie Le Pen's parliamentary assistant. He later moved to become assistant to Euro MP Marie-Christine Arnautu, who is a close ally of Le Pen. Gérin still lives in an annex at Jean-Marie Le Pen's residence la Bonbonnière, at Rueil-Malmaison near Paris. “I'm a bit like his second brain,” Gérin told L'Express. “I free him from everyday tasks, though not household chores.” In the current Front National set-up Gérald Gérin is listed as an “assistant” in Jean-Marie Le Pen's private office.
The trust that the far-right FN founder has in his butler was highlighted in the 2000s when he made Gérin treasurer of his funding association Cotelec, whose aims are to promote Jean-Marie Le Pen's image and support the FN financially. Cotelec lent nearly 3 million euros to the Front National in 2012, and more than four million in 2013. In December 2013 Gérald Gérin also became the treasurer of a 'micro party' called Promolec which is run jointly by Jean-Marie Le Pen and Marine Le Pen, and whose official aim is to “promote the brand image and the actions of Jean-Marie Le Pen and Marine Le Pen”. Its secretary general is Marine Le Pen, and her father is president.
These new revelations about the finances of Jean-Marie Le Pen come at a bad time for both him and the party he created. The Front National has been hit by a bitter public split between Le Pen and his daughter, the FN's president, over comments he made on RMC radio and then later to the magazine Rivarol. He had repeated to RMC his assertion that the Nazi gas chambers were a “detail” of history, then after an angry reaction from his daughter he told the publication that he had been “betrayed by his own”. The party's national committee will decide on May 4th whether or not to sanction the honorary president over his comments.
Moreover, the Front National is also facing unprecedented judicial investigations into the funding of its election campaigns. Examining magistrates Renaud Van Ruymbeke and Aude Buresi have already placed six people under formal examination – one step short of charges being brought – in connection with the affair, FN service providers and senior figures from Marine Le Pen's micro party 'Jeanne'.
The fraud squad in Paris has meanwhile been carrying out a separate investigation into Jean-Marie Le Pen's financial net worth. This preliminary investigation was opened at the end of 2013 after a referral by the body that oversees the financial probity of politicians – the Commission pour la transparence financière de la vie politique, which has since been replaced by the Haute Autorité pour la transparence de la vie publique (HATVP). The Commission, as it then was, had examined the 1,270,000-euro increase in Jean-Marie Le Pen's personal wealth over the period 2004 to 2009 during his time as an MEP, and considered it suspicious in view of his official earnings.
The revelation that Jean-Marie Le Pen was the economic beneficiary of an undisclosed trust in Switzerland could now open up yet another judicial front. He could face action for having made a “false declaration” to the HATVP, or for tax fraud, or both.
In 2012 Mediapart had revealed anomalies in the campaign spending submitted by Gérald Gérin, in his role as treasurer of Cotelec, to the organisation that overseas election expenditure the Commission nationale des comptes de campagne et des financements politiques (CNCCFP). An eleven-day trip to Thailand by Gérin in 2006 had featured in the accounts for Jean-Marie Le Pen's presidential campaign in 2007.
The butler said that the journey had been made to prepare a forthcoming visit to the country by the candidate. “I went to different complexes and residential hotels in Bangkok (Bayan Tree, Sukotai etc) to study the various provisions these various establishments could offer according to our needs (bedrooms, meeting room, transport, cocktail room),” he told Mediapart. “The trip, including bedrooms, mini-bar, telephone and travel, cost 3,482 euros,” added Gérin, who explained that a later coup in Thailand had prevented Le Pen's visit.
As a European Parliament assistant Gérald Gérin is also likely to have to respond to questions from police officers in charge of the investigation opened following a letter from European Parliament president Martin Schulz to French justice minister Christiane Taubira concerning allegations that the FN has been using public funds for fictitious jobs at the institution.
Jean-Marie Le Pen's estate and his possible hidden fortune have, meanwhile, already been the subject of numerous questions, whether it be over an inheritance from the cement firm heir Hubert Lambert which made him a millionaire in the last 1970s, his Swiss bank account with UBS in the 1980s or his friendship with the Geneva banker Jean-Pierre Aubert, who was suspected of money laundering in the early 1990s.
Le Pen's UBS account was opened in 1981 by his old friend Jean-Pierre Mouchard, a publisher who was treasurer for Cotelec before Gérald Gérin, until 1997. As Mediapart has revealed, in the 1990s Mouchard used the services of offshore companies, namely Overseas Property Services Limited in Gibraltar, and the Panamanian company Hadret al Raiss.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter