Paris (AFP)

The Paris prosecutor's office opened an investigation on May 14 for "breach of trust" and "concealment" targeting several leaders of La France insoumise including Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who denounced a "new instrumentalization of justice".

The investigation, entrusted to the Financial Brigade, was revealed by Le Canard chained Tuesday and confirmed to AFP by the Paris prosecutor's office.

According to corroborating sources, it aims to verify the conditions in which LFI executives paid the damages to which they were sentenced in December in the stormy search at LFI headquarters the previous year.

According to the Duck chained, it is specifically the payment of "26,500 euros of moral prejudice to the police" by five LFI officials, which is subject to verification because these payments "have been settled with the checkbook of La France rebellious ".

The question is therefore to know if these damages were indeed paid by the rebellious France but also to know if public money was used in this regulation, summarizes one of the sources contacted by AFP.

"If the criminal part, the fines, must be settled personally by the litigants, which was done by each of the persons concerned, the damages fall to them civil," said Jean-Luc Mélenchon in a statement Tuesday.

"They can therefore as such be settled by a third party. France rebellious has chosen to settle these damages related to a search of its premises," assumes the former presidential candidate.

"We denounce this new instrumentalization of justice which seems to be motivated to feed articles aiming to intimidate us and to convey infamous rumors", he adds.

On October 16, 2018, police and magistrates conducted a search at LFI headquarters in the context of two preliminary investigations by the Paris prosecutor's office.

Several members of rebellious France had intervened and Mr. Mélenchon had jostled a representative of the prosecution and a police officer.

For these facts, the leader of the Insoumis had been sentenced on December 9 to three months in prison suspended by the correctional court of Bobigny for rebellion and provocation. He did not appeal.

He and four of his relatives, including MP Bastien Lachaud and MEP Manuel Bompard, had also been sentenced to fines ranging from 2,000 to 8,000 euros.

gd-edy-grd-bap / jt / cbn

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