Marine Le Pen, her father (Jean-Marie Le Pen), the RN and the leadership of the party of the 2010s will be tried in Paris in the autumn of 2024, suspected of having set up between 2004 and 2016 a system of remuneration by the European Union for assistants to MEPs who actually worked for the party.

Marine Le Pen, who has always denied the accusations, will be tried for embezzlement of public funds and complicity.

The National Rally (RN) said on Friday (8 December) that Marine Le Pen had "committed no offence or irregularity" and "formally contested the accusations made against our MEPs and parliamentary assistants".

The former president of the party (2011-2022) is presented, in the referral order signed on Friday by the two financial investigating judges and consulted by AFP, as "one of the main officials of the system thus set up while she had been informed by her exchanges with the party's treasurer, as early as 2013, of the need to relieve the FN's finances".

"This decision is unfortunately not a surprise," Rodolphe Bosselut, lawyer for the president of the RN group in the National Assembly, said in a statement.

His father – co-founder of the party with the flame in 1972 – will also be in the dock alongside the mayor of Perpignan Louis Aliot, the former number 2 of the party Bruno Gollnisch, the executive vice-president of Reconquête! Nicolas Bay, the former treasurer Wallerand de Saint-Just and the deputy and spokesperson of the RN Julien Odoul.

Read alsoMarine Le Pen: "The European Parliament is in a process of aggression, all our rights have been violated"

In total, 11 people who were elected as MEPs on National Front lists, <> others who were their parliamentary assistants and four collaborators of the far-right party will be tried. The National Rally, as a legal entity, will have to answer for complicity and concealment of embezzlement of public funds, throughout the period in question.

The trial is due to take place in October and November 2024, four months after the European elections, according to the Paris prosecutor's office. A first hearing on the organisation of the trial is scheduled for 27 March, the prosecution said.

The investigation began in March 2015 after the European Parliament announced that it would refer the matter to the EU's anti-fraud office over possible irregularities committed by the FN concerning salaries paid to parliamentary assistants.

"We're going to get turned on"

At the end of the judicial investigation, opened in 2016, "various elements make it possible to envisage the implementation of a fraud system initially intended to ensure the financing of jobs attached to people close to Jean-Marie Le Pen, then president of the FN, and which gradually benefited the party more generally," the two investigating judges wrote.

Among these elements is a letter from the treasurer of the Wallerand de Saint-Just party sent on 16 June 2016 to Marine Le Pen referring to "expenses (which) tend to get out of hand". "We will only get out of this if we make significant savings through the European Parliament and if we get additional payouts," he said.

At the end of a meeting in June 2014 on the availability by MEPs of part of the budget envelopes, MEP Jean-Luc Schaffhauser wrote to the treasurer: "What Marine is asking us to do is equivalent to signing up for fictitious jobs... And it is the deputy who is criminally liable out of his money, even if the party is the beneficiary." "I understand Marine's reasons, but we're going to get turned on," warns Jean-Luc Schaffhauser.

Documents recovered by the investigators, including summary tables of jobs, "demonstrate a global management of the envelopes, the search for an optimization of salary allocations and for some assistants the purely accounting nature of their attachment," emphasize the magistrates, who note "the interference of the FN leaders" in the management of these jobs.

The investigating judges insist on the "systemic nature of embezzlement" which, over the course of the legislatures, has become "a means of financing the party" in a context of financial difficulties.

In 2018, the European Parliament, a civil party, assessed his damage at €6.8 million for the years 2009 to 2017. One of his lawyers declined to comment on Friday.

The parallel trial of the UDF and MoDem MEP assistants has just ended in Paris, with a deliberation scheduled for 5 February.

Rodolphe Bosselut denounced an "inequality of treatment (which) raises questions about the impartiality of the prosecutions", stressing that in the case of the centrists, parliamentary assistants have not been prosecuted.

With AFP

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