Marine Le Pen, in the crosshairs of a European report against fraud

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The far-right candidate for the French presidential election, Marine Le Pen, and relatives were accused of embezzling some 600,000 euros of European public money during their terms as MEPs. The accusation emanates from the European anti-fraud office, according to a new report revealed this Saturday. by the French information site Mediapart and presented to the French justice.

According to Europa Press, the Paris Prosecutor's Office has already opened an investigation of the candidate.

As also confirmed by AFP, which points out that the Paris prosecutor's office confirmed that it received this report on March 11 and that it is currently being analyzed.

"I am surprised by the moment of the revelation" and its "instrumentalization", reacted to AFP Rodolphe Bosselut, the lawyer of Marine Le Pen, campaigning for the second round of the presidential elections, which will take place on April 24, and where he will face current President Emmanuel Macron.

Bosselut says he is "dismayed by the way in which the Olaf (European anti-fraud office) acts, without a contradictory character" and about "old facts of more than ten years" for some.

Marine Le Pen "has not been summoned by any French judicial authority," he added, also regretting that neither he nor his client were recipients of the final report. According to him, the Olaf investigation has been open since 2016 and Le Pen was questioned by mail in March 2021.

Olaf's new report, of which Mediapart publishes excerpts, concerns the fees that political groups can use within the framework of their mandate as MEPs and that Marine Le Pen and her associates would have used for national political purposes, for personal expenses or for services for the benefit of commercial companies close to his party, Regrouping National (RN) and the far-right parliamentary group Europe of Nations and Freedoms (ENL).

Olaf implicates Marine Le Pen, three other former MEPs - his father Jean-Marie Le Pen, his former partner Louis Aliot and Bruno Gollnisch, a member of the RN national office -, and the ENL. The office accuses them of having embezzled about 600,000 euros, of which it recommends its return. According to the report, the candidate of the National Regrouping would have personally embezzled about

when she was an MEP between 2004 and 2017.

Since June 2017, Marine Le Pen has also been prosecuted in the investigation carried out in Paris on suspicion of fictitious work in the European Parliament by party assistants. She is

and "complicity" in this crime as part of this investigation.

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