French National Union leader Marine Le Pen and 26 other people will stand trial for misusing European funds between 2004 and 2016, the Paris public prosecutor’s office announced Friday.
The French court today ordered the case to go to trial, scheduled for autumn 2024 in Paris, just a few months after the European elections.
“Unfortunately, this decision does not come as a surprise,” said Marine Le Pen’s lawyer, Rodolphe Bosselut.
The far-right leader’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, co-founder of the National Front (FN) that gave rise to the National Union, will also be in the dock.
On April 17, 2022, it was announced that Marine Le Pen and people close to her were accused of embezzling around 600,000 euros of European public money during their respective terms as parliamentarians.
The accusation comes from the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF), according to a new report published by the French information portal Mediapart.
The new OLAF report, from which Mediapart has published extracts, concerns aid that political groups can use within the scope of their mandate as MEPs and that Marine Le Pen and people close to her will have used for national political purposes, personal expenses and subsidies to companies close to his party, then called the National Front, and the far-right parliamentary group Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENL).
OLAF implicates Marine Le Pen, three other former French MEPs – her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, her former partner, Louis Aliot, and Bruno Gollnisch, member of the FN national secretariat – and the ENL.
The organization accuses them of embezzling approximately 600,000 euros, which it wants to get back.
According to the report, the National Front candidate personally embezzled around €137,000 in public funds from the Strasbourg parliament between 2004 and 2017 while she was a member of the European Parliament.
Since June 2017, Marine Le Pen has also been prosecuted as part of the ongoing investigation in Paris into suspicions of creating fictitious jobs in the European Parliament for party aides.
Source: DN
