Marine Le Pen and her relatives in the European viewfinder. They are accused by the EU Anti-Fraud Office (Olaf) of having embezzled no less than 600,000 euros of European public money during their mandates as MEPs, according to a new report revealed this Saturday by Mediapart and handed over to the French courts. Information confirmed by the Paris prosecutor’s office, which claims to have received this report on March 11. It is being analyzed.
“I am amazed at the always strong timing about the revelation” and sound “instrumentalization”, reacted Me Rodolphe Bosselut, the lawyer for Marine Le Pen, campaigning for the second round of the presidential election. Me Bosselut also says to himself “appalled by the way Olaf acts, without contradictory character” and on “old facts more than ten years old” for some people. Marine Le Pen “has not been summoned by any French judicial authority whatsoever”, he added, deploring also that neither he nor his client were recipients of the final report. According to him, Olaf’s investigation has been open since 2016 and Ms Le Pen was questioned by mail in March 2021.
Olaf’s new report, of which Mediapart publishes extracts, concerns the fees that political groups can use in the context of their mandate as MEPs and that Marine Le Pen and her relatives would have used for national political purposes, for personal expenses or for benefits for the benefit of commercial companies close to the National Rally and the far-right parliamentary group Europe des nations et des libertés (ENL).
Olaf implicates Marine Le Pen, three other former MEPs – her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, her former companion Louis Aliot and Bruno Gollnisch, member of the national office of the RN -, and the ENL. The office accuses them of having embezzled around 600,000 euros, of which it recommends reimbursement. According to the report, the candidate of the National Rally would have personally embezzled around 137,000 euros of public money from the Parliament of Strasbourg 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 jobs in the European Parliament of party assistants. She is being investigated for “embezzlement of public funds” and “complicity” of this offense in the context of this judicial investigation.