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MARINE LE PEN

Marine Le Pen charged over EU parliament funding scandal

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen was charged Friday over claims her party illegally claimed millions of euros from the European Parliament to pay for France-based staff.

Published: 30 June 2017 17:47 CEST
Marine Le Pen charged over EU parliament funding scandal
Photo: AFP
Rodolphe Bosselut said Le Pen had been summoned by investigating magistrates in Paris and that they had, “as expected, charged her”, adding that she would appeal.
 
A judicial source told AFP she had been charged with breach of trust over the salaries paid to her chief of staff Catherine Griset and her bodyguard Thierry Legier and for complicity in breach of trust as FN leader.
   
If tried and convicted, Le Pen faces up to three years imprisonment and a fine of up to 375,000 euros ($425,000), although it is unlikely she would receive a custodial sentence.
   
The 48-year-old National Front leader, who made a failed run for president this year, invoked her immunity as a member of the European Parliament in refusing to answer questions from investigators during the campaign.
   
She had however promised to cooperate with the investigation after the May presidential and June parliamentary elections were over.
   
At Friday's meeting with the magistrates, she read out a declaration and declined to answer questions, as allowed by the law, her lawyer told AFP.
 
Investigators suspect the FN used money from Brussels earmarked for parliamentary assistants to pay staff for party work in France.
   
The European Parliament claims it was defrauded of up to five million euros.
   
Griset and another FN assistant have already been charged with covering up breach of trust.
 
Le Pen was first elected to the European Parliament in 2004.
   
She is one of 17 National Front lawmakers — along with her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, from whom she is estranged, and her partner, FN vice-president Louis Aliot — being investigated over salaries paid to around 40 parliamentary assistants.
 

Macron allies probed
 
The centrist MoDem party, which is allied to President Emmanuel Macron's Republic on the Move party, has been targeted in a preliminary probe over similar allegations involving assistants' salaries.
   
Le Pen, an anti-EU nationalist, beat the candidates of the traditional right and left to secure a spot in May's presidential run-off against Macron, a pro-EU centrist.
   
But she was soundly beaten by Macron in the second round, by 66.1 to 33.9 percent.
   
Her legal woes took a back seat during the campaign to the scandal ensnaring her conservative rival Francois Fillon, whose wife was paid nearly 700,000 euros for a suspected fake job as a French parliamentary assistant.
 
In legislative elections held directly afterwards she was elected to the National Assembly for the first time, winning a seat in the northern former coalmining region of Pas-de-Calais.

 
In April, The Local reported that the European Parliament believed the fake jobs scandal involving Marine Le Pen's National Front (FN) party cost the institution nearly €5 million ($5.5 million), according to a source in the French press at the time. 
 
The cost of the scandal, which involves the employment of assistants and a bodyguard, rose to €4,978,122 after “new information” was discovered, a source told AFP.
 
The previous cost was estimated at €1.9 million.
 
Earlier during April, French prosecutors asked the European parliament to lift the immunity of far-right presidential candidate over the inquiry into alleged fake parliamentary jobs.
 
The demand was made after she invoked her parliamentary immunity in refusing to attend questioning by investigating magistrates on March 10.
 
The case is linked to an expenses inquiry in which the European Parliament has accused Le Pen's FN of defrauding it to the tune of some €340,000 ($360,000).
 
The parliament believes the party used funds allotted for parliamentary assistants to pay Le Pen's personal assistant Catherine Griset and her bodyguard Thierry Legier for party work in France.
 
French investigators leading the case raided the party's headquarters outside Paris in March in a bid to determine whether the FN used European funds to pay for 20 assistants — presented as parliamentary aides — who were working for the party elsewhere.
 
Le Pen shrugged off the request to have her immunity lifted, saying it was “normal”.
 
“It's totally normal procedure, I'm not surprised,” she told Franceinfo radio.
 
The allegations appear to have had little impact on Le Pen's campaign.
 
Investigators probing the allegations against the FN also raided the party's headquarters outside Paris.
 

MARINE LE PEN

OPINION: The real threat to France’s democracy is Le Pen and the ex generals threatening civil war

We have been here before, writes John Lichfield, as a group of French military officers publish a second open letter warning of 'civil war' in France.

Published: 14 May 2021 12:06 CEST
OPINION: The real threat to France's democracy is Le Pen and the ex generals threatening civil war
Photo: Christophe Archambault/AFP

The campaign of political poison-pen letter writing by French military officers recalls other times – some surprisingly recent – that parts of the country’s army felt justified in interfering in politics.

The letters also recall efforts elsewhere, including those of Donald Trump, to encourage fear and loathing for political ends.

The two letters, published by the far-right magazine, Valeurs Actuelles, allege that France is on the verge of “disintegration” and “civil war”. They warn of military intervention and “thousands of deaths” unless President Emmanuel Macron acts to combat a rising tide of violence, radical Islam and the “hordes” in the multi-racial suburbs or banlieues.

READ ALSO: Five minutes to understand: Why a group of French generals are warning of ‘civil war’

No ideas are put forward about what might be done. The reference to “hordes”  is the kind of racist language found daily in the “fachosphère”, the phalanx of far-right blogs and fake news sites on the French-language internet.

The letters have been received with some glee by parts of the right-wing media in the UK.

They should be taken seriously for what they are: a Trump-like campaign by people close to the far-right leader Marine Le Pen to darken the already febrile mood of France 11 months before presidential elections.

They should not be taken seriously for what they say. They present an absurdly exaggerated picture of France’s genuine problems with radical Islam and other forms of violence.

In a more rational political climate, the letters would have damaged Le Pen more than Macron.

For ten years she has been telling us that she is not her father; that the Rassemblement National is not the Front National; that she is not racist; that she is a good republican and democrat; that she can be trusted with power.

Now here she is rejoicing in letters which are stuffed with lies and racist vocabulary and which threaten, implicitly, a military coup unless something or other (no suggestions yet available) is done to fight Islamism and violent crime.

The government, initially slow to react and counter the letter’s absurd narrative, has finally started to make this point.

The Prime Minister, Jean Castex, asked: “How can people – and Madame Le Pen in particular – who aspire to run the state support an initiative which implies a revolt against the state’s institutions?”

Castex added that Le Pen had been “chasing away her true nature but it has now returned at the double”.

The retired Gendarmerie captain who wrote the first letter is no random ex-member of the military.  Jean-Pierre Fabre-Bernadac, 70, was Jean-Marie Le Pen’s chief security officer in the 1990s. He now runs a far-right website.

The lead signature was that of a former head of the Foreign Legion, General Christian Piquemal, 80, who has already been dismissed from the honorary army reserve for his involvement with racist movements.

That letter was also signed by over 100 other officers, mostly retired but some still serving. Not all of them have a known record of far-right activity. That military officers should be right-wing in their politics is unsurprising: that they should sign a letter de fact threatening a coup is disturbing.

It is difficult to know how widely their attitude is shared in a French military whose upper ranks are now increasingly female and ethnically diverse. A second letter was published last weekend which purported to have been written and signed by serving officers but no names were given.

The present military chief of staff, General François Lecointre, said both letters had “seriously transgressed against” the twin military obligations in a democracy of neutrality and silence. He invited those who had approved the second letter (if they actually exist) to leave the army and enter politics.

What is even more disturbing, in my view, is that no politician of the moderate right has made a strong attack on these letters.

They have criticised the implied threat of military intervention but happily endorsed the letter’s absurdly dark, Trumpian portrait of “Macron’s France” in 2021.

The essential argument of the letters are correct, they say. France is increasingly violent. Parts of the inner suburbs (banlieues) are “no go zones”. Patriotic values are mocked; anti-white racism is preached.

Like all great populist lies, those allegations include elements  of the truth.

France has suffered more than 30 Islamist terror attacks in the last six years. Parts of the multi-racial banlieues – how often have our generals actually visited them, one wonders? –  are  violent, crime-ridden places and have been for years.

But the great majority of citizens in the banlieues – and the great majority of France’s five million Muslims – are hard-working and law-abiding and want to get on with their lives. Referring to them generically as “hordes” is an attempt to create problems, not to solve them.

And what of the supposed wave of violence? 

In 2016, the year before Macron became President, there were 575,000 acts of physical, non-domestic violence in France. By 2018, it had reached 693,000. But as recently as 2008 – when the fiercely pro-law-and-order Nicolas Sarkozy was president – there were 875,000.

IN NUMBERS Are crime rates really spiralling in France?

The figures go up and down. There is no “explosion”. The overall trend since the 1990s has been down.

The other great lie in the generals’ letter is the allegation that Macron’s response to the radical Islamist threat has been “evasion” and “guilty silence”.

Can this, be the same President Macron who is accused of “islamophobia” by parts of the French Left and racism by parts of the US media because he brought forward a new law this year to try to curb radical Islam?

READ ALSO What is in Macron’s new law to crack down on Islamist extremism?

The letters suggest that French democracy is fragile and the military may have to intervene to save it. The real threat to French  democracy comes from the letter-writers and their backers, including Madame Le Pen.

It also also comes from the self-seeking cowardice of “mainstream” politicians of the right who failed to condemn the letters for the grotesque, electoral manoeuvre that they are.

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