Le Pen suspected of having embezzled 137,000 euros of public money, according to a European report – The HuffPost

via Associated PressMarine Le Pen, April 13, 2022. INQUIRY – Marine Le Pen and her relatives are accused by the European Anti-Fraud Office of having embezzled around 600,000 euros of European public money during their mandates as MEPs, according to a new 116-page report revealed this Saturday, April 16, by Mediapart and submitted to French justice. Asked by AFP, the Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed that it received this report on March 11, which is currently being analyzed. The facts brought to light by the European Anti-Fraud Office (Olaf) “are likely to give rise to criminal proceedings against the former deputies”, underlines the report. This new Olaf report, of which Mediapart publishes extracts, concerns the expenses that political groups can use in the context of their mandate as MEPs. According to the document, Marine Le Pen and her relatives would have used for national political purposes, for personal expenses or for benefits for the benefit of commercial companies close to the National Rally and the far-right parliamentary group Europe des nations et des libertés. (ENL). More than 303,000 euros claimed from Jean-marie Le PenOlaf implicates Marine Le Pen, three other former MEPs – his father Jean-Marie Le Pen, his former companion Louis Aliot and Bruno Gollnisch, member of the national office of the RN – , and the ENL. The office accuses them of having embezzled around 600,000 euros, which he recommends reimbursement. “Olaf concluded that the behavior of the four former Members of the European Parliament […] jeopardized the reputation of the institutions of the Union”, write the authors of the report. The candidate of the National Rally would have personally embezzled around 137,000 euros of public money from the Strasbourg Parliament when she was a MEP between 2004 and 2017. Olaf claims a little more than 303,000 euros from Jean-Marie Le Pen, around 43,000 euros from Bruno Gollnisch and nearly 2,500 euros to Louis Aliot, reports the online news site. About 131,000 euros are claimed from the ENL group. Among the suspicious expenses noted by the office: 23,100 euros of promotional items which were delivered to the headquarters of the FN and which “seem to have been purchased for the congress” of the party organized in Lyon in 2014 or even more than 4,000 euros spent for the purchase of bottles of wine and which were “distributed by Bruno Gollnisch at the same congress”, details Médiapart. revelation” and its “instrumentalization”, reacted to AFP Me Rodolphe Bosselut, the lawyer for Marine Le Pen, campaigning for the second round of the presidential election. The lawyer also said he was “dismayed by the way in which the European anti-fraud office acts, without contradictory character” and on “old facts more than ten years old” for some. Marine Le Pen “has not been summoned by any French judicial authority whatsoever”, he added, deploring also that neither he nor his client were recipients of the final report. According to him, Olaf’s investigation has been open since 2016 and the far-right MP was questioned by mail in March 2021. According to Médiapart, MP RN indicates in a written response to Olaf that the accountant Belgian Charles Van Houtte, “pillar of the frontist system in the European Parliament”, would have left her “in ignorance of her external activities”. She says she ignores “the arrangements of companies, the relations between them, the existence or not within them of personnel, their corporate purpose”. Since June 2017, Marine Le Pen has also been prosecuted in the investigation carried out in Paris. on suspicion of fictitious jobs in the European Parliament of party assistants. She is indicted for “embezzlement of public funds” and “complicity” in this offense as part of this judicial investigation. See also on The HuffPost: These Marseillais do not want Macron, but they will block Le Pen