Judged for "embezzlement of public funds", Mr. Lagarde had then recruited the mother of his wife Monique Escolier-Lavail and had paid her more than 39,000 euros in wages in exchange for her help to write a book on SMEs which is not never appeared.
Wanting to punish "unbearable facts for the social body", the prosecution also called for a five-year deprivation of civil rights against him.
A six-month suspended prison sentence was requested against his 69-year-old mother-in-law, whose work left no "material trace" and whose prosecutors criticized the "incoherent and vague answers".
At the helm, Mr. Lagarde justified having appealed to his mother-in-law, former boss of SMEs, by his wish to "discover things that we do not read in books".
Rejecting any fictitious job, his mother-in-law struggled to detail the exact content of his mission in the service of his son-in-law, evoking the "reading of newspapers" and some "informal conversations" with bosses of small businesses.
The investigation was opened by the National Financial Prosecutor's Office in October 2017 after the complaint of Hacène Chibane, EELV opposition adviser in Drancy (Seine-Saint-Denis), who initially questioned the employment of parliamentary assistant of Mr. Lagarde's wife, Aude Lavail-Lagarde, between 2002 and 2014.
At the end of the investigation which looked into 18 contracts of parliamentary assistants concluded by Mr. Lagarde, only the case of the mother-in-law of the former city councilor had been retained.
Since a law of September 2017 passed after the affair of the Fillon spouses, the recruitment of parliamentary assistants within the close family circle is prohibited.
Allied with LR during the last legislative elections, the president of the Union of Democrats and Independents (UDI) has seen the legal clouds accumulate in recent months.
At the beginning of September, the 54-year-old former deputy was thus placed in police custody in the investigation into the false accusations, relayed by Le Point, against the one who took his seat in the Assembly in June, Raquel Garrido. , and her husband Alexis Corbière.
© 2022 AFP