The boss of the UDI is accused of having granted a fictitious job as a parliamentary assistant to his mother-in-law, supposed to help him write a book that has never appeared.
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UA one-year suspended prison sentence was requested on Monday against the boss of the UDI and former deputy for Seine-Saint-Denis Jean-Christophe Lagarde, suspected of having granted a fictitious job as a parliamentary assistant to his mother-in-law between May 2009 and August 2010. Tried for “embezzlement of public funds”, Jean-Christophe 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 that never appeared. Wanting to sanction “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, the former deputy justified having appealed to his mother-in-law, former boss of SMEs, by her 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 the wife of the mayor at the time, Aude Lavail-Lagarde, between 2002 and 2014. At the end of the investigation which looked into 18 contracts of parliamentary assistants concluded by Jean-Christophe Lagarde, only had been retained the case of the mother-in-law of the former aedile. 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 now prohibited.
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Blasted computer
The investigation opened by the PNF in 2017, however, revealed no trace of the “five hours of work a day, seven days a week”, which she says she dedicated to this mission by “reading the newspapers”, “watching information” or through “informal conversations”. The computer where her newspaper clippings and observations were recorded was damaged by the lightning that struck her house in March 2017, while the USB keys and letters via which she communicated with her son-in-law disappeared.
“We cannot deduce from the absence of a material element the fact that there was no work. It is an attack on the rights of the defense, ”said his lawyer Virginie Tesnière. Her voice strangled by sobs, the defendant admits not having fully responded to the mission entrusted to her, but defends herself from any offense. “It is in no way fictitious, she swears. Even if sometimes I didn’t succeed, I worked, I never cheated in my life. “ Deputy of Seine-Saint-Denis for twenty years, ex-mayor of Drancy, his son-in-law seems much more at ease in front of the court. In the course of his explanations, the former deputy dwells on his past conflicts with Nicolas Sarkozy or his proximity to Jean-Louis Borloo.
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On the merits of the case, Jean-Christophe Lagarde lip service admits the “atypical” nature of the contract concluded with his mother-in-law to justify himself immediately. “She could make me discover things that you don’t read in books,” he says. During searches at his home, no evidence of their collaboration was found, nor was the first part of this book on SMEs that Jean-Christophe Lagarde says he wrote and which he would have long since got rid of.
Criticizing a “lazy investigation”, his lawyer Yvon Goutal calls on the court not to confuse this file with the case of the Fillon spouses, whose shadow hangs over this trial and which also concerned parliamentary jobs in the family circle. “There were very clear incriminating elements in the Fillon case which are totally absent here”, he affirms, assuring that “suspicion is not enough”.
Judgment is expected on December 7.