Marine Le Pen tried on suspicion of embezzlement of EU funds

The Paris Court announced, this Thursday, that the leader of the French extreme right, Marine Le Pen, along with 26 other members of the National Union (RN) will be tried, in September, on suspicion of embezzlement of funds Europeans.

The former president of RN, and current mayor of Perpignan, Louis Aliot, who, like Marine Le Pen, is accused of embezzling funds, said: “We will finally be able to defend ourselves”.

The 26 members of the RN are suspected of putting into practice, “in a concerted and deliberate manner”, a “diversion system” of envelopes – which contained 21 thousand euros, every month – allocated by the European Union (EU), to each MEP , to pay parliamentary assistants who worked wholly or partially for the party.

Judicial magistrates will decide, on July 3, after expert opinion, whether the father of the far-right leader and founder of the National Front (currently RN), Jean-Marie Le Pen, aged 95, is able to prepare his defense and attending the trial

Among the defendants are 11 European deputies elected on FN lists, 12 of their parliamentary assistants and four party officials.

The defendants have been investigated since March 2015, when the European Parliament (EP) indicated that it had referred to the EU anti-fraud office possible irregularities, carried out by the FN, regarding the salaries paid to parliamentary assistants.

A year later, the investigations were passed on to two financial investigation judges in Paris, and Marine Le Pen was accused, in June 2017, of breach of trust and complicity. These accusations were later reclassified as “embezzlement of public funds”.

In 2018, three years after the investigations began, the EP reported that it lost, between 2009 and 2017, 6.8 million euros.