The trial of French far-right figurehead and presidential hopeful Marine Le Pen and 24 others from her party on charges of embezzling European Parliament funds opened in Paris on Monday.
Due to last until the end of November, Le Pen, 56, and her fellow defendants, if found guilty, face fines, prison terms and a bar from public office, which in her case would exclude her from mounting a fourth bid for the presidency – at a moment when her Rassemblement National (RN) party, the largest in the new parliament elected in June, has never been closer to power.
The Eurosceptic party itself, as a legal entity, is also on trial for the alleged offences committed between 2004 and 2016, when it was still named the Front National.
The defendants include 11 former Front National Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). Notable among these are these are the RN principal vice-chairman Louis Aliot, 55, mayor of the southern town of Perpignan, and veteran party figure Bruno Gollnisch, 74. Others include 12 former FN party workers who were appointed as parliamentary assistants.
Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, 96, father of Marine and who was an MEP from 2004 to 2019, will not appear in court for medical reasons, as is also the case of a former vice-chairman, Jean-François Jalkh.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
When, in March 2015, the then president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, alerted the French authorities to the suspected fake jobs scam, when Front National (FN) party staff were paid as parliamentary assistants when in fact they allegedly worked exclusively for the FN, he estimated the annual financial prejudice for the institution at 1.5 million euros. That concerned 20 parliamentary assistant contracts, made out by 16 FN MEPs.
As the official French judicial investigation into the affair progressed, the European Parliament lowered the estimate of the prejudice against it to 3.2 million euros for the entire 12-year period in question. Before the trial opened on Monday, the party had refunded the parliament a sum of 1.1 million euros.
Each MEP had a monthly budget of 24,164 euros, paid out of European Parliament funds, to remunerate their assistants. The prosecution case is that the far-right party, for long openly critical of the European Union institutions, decided on the assistant posts according to its financial needs. The personal bodyguard for Jean-Marie Le Pen (when the latter was an MEP) and subsequently for Marine le Pen, was paid as a parliamentary assistant for several of the party’s MEPs from 2005 until 2012. Similarly, Yann Le Pen, sister of Marine Le Pen, was remunerated as the parliamentary assistant to FN MEPs between 2004 and 2014, while she was employed, based at party headquarters, in the “events” bureau and subsequently that of “large” events.
Other examples of France-based party staff paid as European Parliament assistants include Jean-Marie Le Pen’s chief of staff, his secretary and his odd-job man, and an advisor and assistant of Marine Le Pen’s. A graphic designer for the party was also put on the parliamentary assistant payroll.
Jean-François Jalkh, 67, who was briefly a Member of Parliament (MP) for the party in France in the 1980s, who served as a vice-chairman of the FN from 2012 to 2018, was also employed as a parliamentary assistant for FN MEPs between 2004 and 2014, when he became an MEP himself.
“It emerges from the investigations that the Front National, through the actions of its cadres and leaders, put in place an organised fraudulent system of embezzlement of European funds for its profit, by means of fake employment of parliamentary assistants,” concluded a summary report by the OCLCIFF detectives dated February 2021.
In their 159-page ruling detailing why the defendants were being sent for trial, a document obtained by Mediapart, the investigating magistrates leading the case, Cécile Meyer-Fabre and Marie-Catherine Idiart, noted: “Various elements [suggest] the putting in place of a fraudulent system initially aimed at ensuring the financing of the employment of people close to Jean-Marie Le Pen, when he was chairman of the FN, and which progressively more largely benefitted the FN, which became the RN.”
The magistrates also underlined the “systemic nature of the embezzlements […]” which they said “operated for the profit of a management led by successive leaders of the FN amid a context of financial difficulty”.
Marine Le Pen’s alleged central role
As for Marine Le Pen, she is standing trial over her roles both as the employer of parliamentary assistants (she was an MEP between 2004 and 2017), and also as then chairwoman of the party. She is accused of creating three parliamentary assistant contracts which the investigation concluded were used to pay her personal assistant based at the party’s headquarters, and to remunerate Jean-Marie Le Pen’s chief of staff and also his bodyguard.
The prosecution cites evidence in the form of witness statements, and the contents of emails and mobile phone text messages seized during the investigation, as showing that Marine Le Pen ordered and supervised the system of fraud. The magistrates wrote that Marine Le Pen “had a real power of impulsion and decision-making on the principle of the recruitment, of the posting of a party worker to such and such an MEP, the bonuses, and this independently of the European Parliament member to whom the parliamentary assistant was theoretically attached”.
In a damning email dating from 2014, part of the prosecution evidence, the party treasurer sent an email to Marine Le Pen which read: “In the coming years, and in every scenario, we will only get through if we make large savings thanks to the European Parliament and if we obtain supplementary payments.”
In its line of defence, the RN, which denies it was involved in any system of fraud and refutes the allegations it engaged in fake parliamentary assistant jobs, has dismissed the trial as a “political plot” and a “settling of scores”.
Meanwhile, eight members of the centre-right MoDem party, allied to President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, were found guilty (along with the party itself) in February of similar charges of organising a system of fake MEP assistant jobs, albeit involving lesser funds. That case is due to be re-heard on appeal.
The radical-left France Insoumise party (LFI) is also under investigation over the suspected illicit remuneration of two assistants to the party figurehead Jean-Luc Mélenchon when her was an MEP between 2009 and 2017.
“Marine is ready to fight, she will be very present at the trial, she wants to set the record straight,” said lawyer and RN MEP Alexandre Varaut before the trial opened. He said there would be no question of adopting the same line of defence as that of the MoDem “by saying ‘we all worked hard’”, but that instead, “We take responsibility for everything that was done”.
“We have no problem with the reality. Yes, collaborators carried out political activity with the party that got their member of parliament elected,” he said. “Yes, [parliamentary] assistants were at FN headquarters to work. There was a total osmosis between their life as an assistant and their life as [a party] militant.”
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse