Marine Le Pen suspected of embezzlement of public money in a new report by the European Union Anti-Fraud Office

A report by the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF), sent to French justice on March 11, implicates four former far-right MEPs, including Marine Le Pen, for having misused nearly 620 000 euros of public money, according to information revealed by Mediapart on Saturday April 16. According to the online news site, which publishes excerpts from the document, the candidate of the National Rally (RN) is accused by OLAF of having personally embezzled nearly 137,000 euros of public money from the Parliament of Strasbourg when she was a MEP (2004-2017). Bruno Gollnisch and Louis Aliot, both RN executives, are also implicated, as well as Jean-Marie Le Pen, from whom OLAF is claiming just over 303,000 euros. All would have “endangered the reputation of the institutions of the Union” by their “fraudulent actions” “likely to give rise to criminal proceedings”, according to the report cited by Mediapart. For its part, the Paris prosecutor’s office said that the document was “under analysis”. In detail, OLAF points to several expenses deemed suspicious, such as 23,100 euros of promotional items delivered to the party’s headquarters and which “seem to have been purchased for the FN congress [Front national] in Lyon” in 2014, or even 4,107 euros of bottles of Beaujolais, which would have been, according to Mediapart, distributed by Bruno Gollnisch during the same congress. Already indicted For her part, Marine Le Pen has justified to OLAF the European nature of the events for which Parliament’s money had been used, or replied that she had no knowledge of certain alleged facts. Her lawyer also informed Mediapart that she “does not know anything” about the conclusions of the report to which she “never had access”, while she is “yet a person particularly concerned”. The candidate of the National Rally has already been indicted since 2018 for “breach of trust” and “embezzlement of public funds” in the case of parliamentary assistants. Opened in 2016, the investigation, which is based in part on an OLAF report, concerns a possible “system” organized by the party and its president – which they dispute – to finance the salaries of its permanent staff on the funds from the European Union, by diverting the envelopes of MEPs reserved for the use of parliamentary assistants. The damage was assessed at 6.8 million euros by the European Parliament. Read also European parliamentary assistants: the investigation targeting the RN is the most damning Le Monde