Seven months before the presidential election, the investigating judges responsible for investigating suspicions of fictitious jobs as assistants of MEPs from the National Rally (RN) have closed their investigations.

The parties now have three months to make observations and requests for acts.

If the investigations are not relaunched at the end of this period, the Paris prosecutor's office will have to make its requisitions before the final decision of the investigating magistrates on a possible referral to the court for a trial.

If the lawyer of Marine Le Pen was unreachable Monday to comment on the end of the investigations in this file, Me François Wagner, lawyer of Jean-Marie Le Pen, assured to wait "to know the indictment of the prosecution", without doing more comments.

Marine Le Pen is indicted in June 2017

For the record, in this vast dossier, 29 elected officials and assistants in total, including the president of the RN, her father and senior party officials, were indicted, most of them for “embezzlement of public funds”. The investigation began in March 2015, when the European Parliament announced that it had referred to the EU anti-fraud office any irregularities committed by the National Front (renamed RN since) concerning salaries paid to assistants. parliamentarians.

The investigation was entrusted at the end of 2016 to two Parisian financial examining magistrates for acts of “organized gang fraud” and “hidden work”, initially targeting 17 elected or ex-elected frontists and around forty assistants. .

Marine Le Pen was indicted in June 2017 for “breach of trust” and “complicity”, prosecutions later reclassified as “embezzlement of public funds”.

Louis Aliot, vice-president of the party and former MEP, MEPs Nicolas Bay and Bruno Gollnisch, and the party will follow in particular.

Jean-Marie Le Pen is indicted in September 2019. The last will be MEP Jean-François Jalkh, RN lawyer, on July 6, 2021.

A "diversion system" of the envelopes allocated by the EU to each MEP

The magistrates suspect the RN of having "in a concerted and deliberate manner" set up a "system of diversion" of the envelopes (21,000 euros per month) allocated by the European Union to each deputy to pay parliamentary assistants. The latter would have actually worked, in whole or in part, for the RN, thus allowing it substantial savings in wages. The European Parliament, civil party, reassessed in 2018 its loss to 6.8 million euros in this case running over the years 2009 to 2017.

The announcement of the end of the investigations comes at the start of a presidential campaign for which Marine Le Pen is a candidate.

"We will end up with a final indictment (from the prosecution) or a dismissal order (from the investigating judges) in the first quarter, in the midst of the presidential campaign ... After six years of instruction, it is well aimed!" , regretted a lawyer of the file.

These deadlines could, however, be considerably lengthened by the appeals filed by the defense.

In recent years, the defendants' lawyers have indeed increased the number of applications before the Court of Appeal to bring down the procedure.

At the same time, separate investigations are also targeting the assistants of MoDem MEPs and the leader of La France Insoumise Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

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  • Francois Bayrou

  • Marine Le Pen

  • European Parliament

  • Investigation

  • Society

  • National gathering

  • National Front