(Reuters) – The Paris prosecutor’s office on Friday requested the referral to the criminal court of eleven MEPs, including Marine Le Pen and her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, in the so-called case of the parliamentary assistants of the National Front, which has since become National Rally (RN). ).
The Paris prosecutor’s office requested the referral of eleven MEPs to the criminal court for embezzlement of public funds and thirteen parliamentary assistants for concealment of embezzlement of public funds.
Among the MEPs concerned, therefore, are Marine Le Pen and the founder of the FN Jean-Marie Le Pen who are also suspected of complicity in the embezzlement of public funds, as well as Louis Aliot, mayor of Perpignan and Bruno Gollnisch, former number two of the party.
Marine Le Pen faces up to ten years in prison and a maximum fine of one million euros as well as a ten-year ineligibility sentence, indicates the Paris prosecutor’s office.
The legal procedure was opened following a report from the European Parliament in 2015 on the situation of several MEPs and parliamentary assistants from the National Front between 2014 and 2016.
Parliament questioned the role of parliamentary assistants who were supposed to work full time for their MEP but who occupied important functions in the FN organizational chart.
A judicial investigation was then opened in December 2016, under the initial qualifications of breach of trust, concealment of breach of trust, organized gang fraud, forgery and use of forgery and concealed work committed between 2010 and 2016.
“We contest this vision which seems erroneous to us of the work of opposition deputies and their assistants which is above all political,” an RN spokesperson told Reuters.
“Strangely, these kinds of decisions are taken systematically and opportunely during electoral periods, this is starting to show,” adds those around Marine Le Pen.
The RN hopes to elect several senators during Sunday’s elections aimed at renewing half of the Senate.
(Report by Juliette Jabkhiro and Elizabeth Pineau, written by Zhifan Liu, edited by Blandine Hénault)
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