The French far-right party União Nacional (RN, in its original abbreviation), led by Marine Le Pen, is said to have embezzled 6.8 million euros of European Parliament funds, according to a police investigation cited by the weekly. The Sunday Newspaper.
In 2017 and 2018, Le Pen was accused of misusing trust and misappropriating public funds in recruiting assistants who had already worked for RN.
The situation revealed on Sunday dates back to a time when the National Army was led by the father of the current leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, but it will actually take shape under the presidency of Marine Le Pen, after the 2014 European elections, with the far-right winning the party with 24 places.
weekly The Sunday Newspaper It is reported that the administration of appropriations attributed to the appointment of employees was “central” by the party, which allowed its deputies only to choose an assistant and was responsible for appointing the rest.
The RN leader responded through her Twitter account, describing The Sunday Newspaper As the “official organ of the Macronista”, referring to Emmanuel Macron, President of France.
It raises the same issue of the parliamentary assistants as in all elections. Nothing new, “he wrote, adding references to the upcoming regional elections in June.
Speaking to French news channel BFM, the party’s treasurer, Eliran de Saint-Just, accused Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti of being behind the revelations of the police investigation.
“He spends his life saying he wants to hurt NB as much as possible. This is of course a political maneuver just before the regional elections. He is using that newspaper and this story that we don’t know where it came from and this is a bunch of inaccuracies and slanders.”
The subject of the dispute is a 98-page report, delivered on February 15 to the investigative judge, which stated that European funds were not only used to pay the salaries of employees who already worked with the party, but also to some who had collected work contracts inappropriately.
The French MP and candidate for the 2022 presidential election has been presented as being directly responsible for this fraudulent system that will consist of financing party workers’ wages with European money, and diverting funds donated to members of the European Parliament to hire assistants.
to me The Sunday NewspaperMost of the suspects claimed that they destroyed their files when changing computers, or kept nothing to justify their reward from the European Parliament.
In September 2018, Le Pen denied in court that he had committed a fraud. This Sunday, the lawyer for the leader of the RN party, Rudolf Poselot, reiterated that all of the aforementioned parliamentary assistants had worked “at one point or another” in the European structure.
The newspaper also states that the European Parliament did not wait for the completion of the criminal proceedings before demanding the money. In 2016, he asked Le Pen to pay 339,000 euros and for months withholding part of the credits for this purpose, until he got back about 60,000 euros. When Le Pen left the European Parliament, the transfers were stopped.
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