French far-right leader Marine Le Pen defended herself in court on Monday in a case investigating allegations of the misappropriation of funds granted to MEPs, insisting the assistants were just doing politics.
Le Pen is on trial with 24 members or former members of her party under its previous iteration, the National Front. Charged with misappropriation of public funds, concealment and complicity, they are suspected of having set up or participated in a “centralised system” to manage the “allowances” granted to MEPs.
She faces up to 10 years in prison, a €1 million fine, and a ban from holding public office for up to five years.
“Do [MEPs] work for themselves? I believe that MEPs work for the benefit of their ideas. And who carries their ideas? Their party. The political activity of an elected official is therefore carried out for the benefit of their party,” Le Pen said about the work of assistants for the party’s MEPs.
“If we thought there was a risk, would we have published this organisational chart?” Le Pen said about the assistants who are supposed to be based in Brussels or Strasbourg but appear on the party’s organisational charts in France.
Though the leader of the far-right movement had been saying for weeks that she was “calm”, she gradually appeared somewhat irritated as the presiding judge presented the evidence against Le Pen and her fellow party members.
The judge noted that Catherine Griset, an MEP since 2019, who officially held the position of parliamentary assistant to Le Pen for many years, spent only about 12 hours (740 minutes) in the European Parliament’s offices between October 2014 and August 2015 and never had official accommodation in Brussels or Strasbourg.
The judge noted, however, that Griset’s presence at the far-right party’s offices in Paris between February 2015 and February 2016 was recorded “15 to 22 days per month.”
“Your allowance is not an entitlement,” the judge told Le Pen, stressing that the sums paid by Brussels to MEPs are conditional on them being “able” to fulfil their obligations.
The debate quickly became tense, with the European Parliament’s chief lawyer, Patrick Maisonneuve, commenting to the press that he wanted to return “to a strictly judicial discussion on the use of parliamentary assistants” and that, in his opinion, their work had been “carried out in the interest of the party and not in the interest of the MPs themselves.”
“The European Parliament swallows up the MEPs,” said Le Pen.
“We do politics; our role is for these MEPs to go outside, to meet voters,” she added.
With the government’s draft budget for 2025 due to be debated in the National Assembly in the coming weeks, MP Jean-Philippe Tanguy told Public Sénat on Monday that he believed the trial was political and that political opponents were trying to harm the far-right movement.
(Laurent Geslin | Euractiv.fr)
Source: euractiv.com
