France’s public prosecution services last month received a detailed, 116-page report from the European Union’s anti-fraud agency, OLAF, which accuses far-right presidential election candidate Marine Le Pen and others close to her of the fraudulent misuse of a total of more than 617,000 euros from the European Parliament’s budget, Mediapart can reveal.
The prosecution services told Mediapart that the document was currently being “analysed”.
Of that sum, Le Pen herself is accused of the fraudulent misuse of close to 137,000 euros (precisely, 136, 993.99 euros) during the period when she was a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) between 2004 and 2017.
The sums in question were, OLAF concluded, used for “national” political activities, in France, on behalf of Le Pen’s then Front National party, renamed in 2018 as the Rassemblement National (RN). The parliament’s budget is provided by European public funds, and the alleged fraud concerned expenses refunds allocated to MEPs and their political groups for activities which are supposed to be strictly limited to the exercise of their parliamentary work.
Le Pen is to face Emmanuel Macron in the election’s final-round playoff on April 24th, in what is forecast by pollsters to be a tight duel. But the EU’s fraud accusations against her and her party represent a major embarrassment, especially given some of her recent electioneering statements. “I will give back to the French people their money,” she said at a campaign meeting in the southern city of Avignon on Thursday adding, “I will return a place of honour to the value of work”.
Le Pen did not directly respond to Mediapart’s request for comment, but did so via her lawyer, Rodolphe Bosselut, who suggested the timing of the revelations was linked to the elections. Using sarcasm, he denounced the “coincidence” with “the second-round campaign of the presidential elections which is in full swing”. He said Le Pen was not aware of the OLAF conclusions to which she “never had access”, and accused the anti-fraud agency of an “absence of independence”.
Bosselut later told French news agency AFP that Le Pen had been questioned by OLAF in a written exchange in March 2021.
OLAF also accuses Marine Le Pen’s now-estranged father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, her former partner and RN vice-president Louis Aliot, and Bruno Gollnisch, a former Front National vice-president, of the alleged fraud when all three were MEPs. It said Jean-Marie Le Pen misappropriated more than 303,000 euros, Gollnisch more than 43,000 euros and Aliot just under 2,500 euros.
Along with them, the OLAF report said that at least 131,000 euros was diverted by the European Parliament hard- and far-right group Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF), active between 2015 and 2019 (now renamed Identity and Democracy), and which was once co-presided by Marine Le Pen.
In all, OLAF is seeking the refunding by all of the above of a total of 617,379.77 euros.
Interviewed on Sunday by public radio France Info, Louis Aliot, who is now RN mayor of the southern city of Perpignan, dismissed the fraud accusations levelled against him and said he “formally contests what is in the article”, referring to Mediapart’s initial revelations published in French late on Saturday.
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“OLAF has concluded that the behaviour of four former members of the European Parliament (Jean-Marie Le Pen, Bruno Gollnisch, Marine Le Pen and Louis Aliot) has endangered the reputation of the [European] Union’s reputation,” stated the OLAF report which was received by the Paris public prosecution services on March 11th.
OLAF said that the details of the alleged fraud it had uncovered were “susceptible to lead to criminal proceedings against the former members […] for the fraudulent actions they have committed to the detriment of the Union’s budget”.
If French prosecutors do open a formal investigation, the suspected crimes as described by OLAF could include “fraud”, “forgery”, “breach of trust” and “misappropriation of public funds”.
Another extract from the report read: “Their repeated, intentional acts over the course of a certain number of years […] and their inappropriate conduct, taking into account their level of roles and responsibility at the European Parliament, constitute sufficient grounds to substantiate a gross misconduct by these four former members [MEPs]. Their behaviour and their disrespect of rules signify that they should be held responsible for their serious violations.”
It is not the first time Marine Le Pen has been accused of misusing European public funds. She has been placed under investigation in France since 2018 for suspected “misappropriation of public funds” in a case concerning the alleged payment of employees of her party in France out of European Parliament funds dedicated to remunerating MEP assistants. Under EU rules, assistants paid for by the European Parliament must perform work “directly linked to the exercise of a Member’s parliamentary mandate”. The parliament has demanded that she refunds 339,000 euros.
When added together with the new fraud accusations levelled by OLAF, Le Pen personally faces a claim that she reimburses a total of 475,000 euros.
The OLAF report received by French prosecutors last month concerns the refunding of expenses that come under the European Parliament’s budget line called “400”, which concerns the expenses an MEP or political group can claim for activities carried out in the exercise of their European mandates. In the case of Le Pen and those close to her, the anti-fraud agency found that not only were sums diverted for national political and personal uses, but that they also relate to false invoicing for service providers which gravitate around her RN party, its MEPs and the personnel of the Europe of Nations and Freedom parliamentary group.
Among the many examples given is the purchase of promotional gadgets (bags, pens and key rings) for 23,100 euros, delivered to the Front National party’s HQ and which, said OLAF, “appears to have been purchased for the FN congress in Lyon” in 2014. Another was the purchase of bottles of Beaujolais wine, totalling 4,107 euros, and which were distributed by Bruno Gollnisch at the same 2014 congress.
The OLAF report also cited a “request for refunding of personal expenses” made by Marine Le Pen’s father, the Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen. This involved an order placed shortly before the end of December 2016 for129 bottles of wine and Champagne worth a total of 8,500 euros. These included fine wines, which in the case of some cost over 100 euros per bottle. Because the European Parliament rules did not allow for the refunding of more than 100 euros per item, the supplier was, noted OLAF, “invited to adapt his invoice”.
OLAF reported that Marine le Pen, when she was president of the Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF) parliamentary group, and its secretary general, Ludovic de Danne, also Le Pen’s advisor on European affairs, validated expense claims involving events organised by her party and which had no link to activities of MEPs in the exercise of their mandates. These expense claims include one totalling 14,315 euros and relating to a Front National conference in September 2015, and another for 2,500 euros in connection with the party’s traditional “White, Blue, Red” fete in southern France in July 2016.
Another example was a claim made by Marine Le Pen for the refunding of almost 5,000 euros for the cost of travel and hotel accommodation for 13 Front National officials for a meeting the party organised in 2010. Among the attendees were Le Pen’s chief of staff, her campaign director, the party’s general secretary and its treasurer.
The meeting was officially entitled “The regions and Europe in face of the financial crisis”. But in a letter sent to the European Parliament by one of those who took part in the meeting, he denounced it as being in fact a gathering to prepare the party’s internal elections to decide its next president (and which Marine Le Pen won six months later, taking over from her father).
According to the account, Marine Le Pen, arriving at the meeting room, unfurled an EU flag and asked one of those present to put it up on the wall and take photos of it, and these were later sent as part of the expenses claim. As soon as the photos were taken, according to the informant, she pointed to the flag and said, “Put that shit away”.
OLAF reported that she denied that version of events when questioned by the agency, and also said that the account of the letter was likely an act of vengeance. She denied that the meeting was about her party’s internal elections and said the participants of the gathering were all “eminently concerned by the subject” of its official title. But, said the report, she provided “no element” to prove a link between the event and her mandate as MEP.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
This abridged English version by Graham Tearse