National Rally denies making illegal payments in embezzlement trial

Lawyers defending members of the French far-right National Rally (RN) against embezzlement charges have argued at the opening of their trial that their clients have committed no offences.

More than 20 former and current RN members are on trial for charges related to allegedly misusing European Parliament funds to pay people who were, in reality, working for the national political party as it faced a fiscal crisis.

While prosecutors accuse RN of having a centralised “system” to misuse the money on purpose, the defence argued that the payments were appropriate for the staffers’ job descriptions.

The trial is expected to go on for two months, with those charged facing penalties of up to 10 years in prison and fines of up to €1 million if convicted. They also risk being declared ineligible to run for elected office for five years.

Among those on trial is former party leader and two-time presidential candidate Marine Le Pen.

She told reporters outside the court on Monday that she was feeling “calm”, saying that the party and its lawyers would defend “parliamentary freedom” and insisting no rules had been broken.

Le Pen’s 96-year-old father Jean-Marie, the party’s longtime leader before her, has been deemed unfit to stand trial. His daughter has said she will be taking legal action after a video emerged showing him singing along with a neo-Nazi rock band at his home.

Professional boundaries

The trial’s opening was marked by a back-and-forth over technicalities, with Le Pen’s lawyer asking a “preliminary question”, a French legal procedure to decide whether a legal issue that arises during a trial falls under the jurisdiction of another court.

Rodolphe Bosselut asked for the EU Court of Justice to address the nature of parliamentary assistants’ work, saying his client “does not claim to be the victim of a political trial”.

He argued that MEPs’ assistants should not be turned into “civil servants”, pointing to the example of assistants working in the French National Assembly.

Bosselut claimed that when the French parliament’s ethics officer was asked if an assistant could expense their attendance at a political party event, the response was that it fell under their role in the parliament.

Patrick Maisonneuve, a lawyer representing the European Parliament — which is also a plaintiff in the case — said that the confidence of voters who had elected the MEPs by universal suffrage had been broken, and that the trial was a question of “fraudulent use” of Parliament funds.

A spokesperson for the Parliament told Euronews ahead of the trial that because the funds concerned came from European public money, European citizens and French taxpayers are also victims in the case.

The European Parliament’s lawyers believe the body “suffered damage both financially and in terms of reputation,” the spokesperson added.

One of the former politicians on trial, Bruno Gollnisch, who is the party’s controversial former vice president, told Euronews: “The [EU rules] do not ban the recruitment of parliamentary assistants who work in part for the political group of their MEPs”.

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Gollnisch, who is also known for having questioned historians’ records of the Holocaust, is accused of using European Parliament funds to pay for the party’s co-founder Jean-Marie Le Pen’s two private secretaries and chief of staff.

Despite comments at the trial from lawyers that they don’t consider it a political one, Gollnisch added that in his view, the trial was meant to ruin the party’s reputation.

Another angle

This is not the only major recent embezzlement trial in France.

The centrist Democratic Movement party (MoDem) recently faced the same court for misusing EU funds. Several party members received suspended prison sentences earlier this year, but MoDem leader François Bayrou was acquitted.

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Didier Rebut, director of the Paris Institute for Criminology and Criminal Law and a law professor at the Paris-Panthéon-Assas University, told Euronews ahead of the current trial that while Bayrou’s defence was about his alleged ignorance of the act, there appeared to be more evidence against the RN.

“The big difference is related to the evidence of the party leadership’s involvement in the [misuse of funds],” said Rebut, who added that Le Pen’s defence could not be the same as Bayrou’s.

He added that the case is being tried in France because the acts were committed in part in France, and that European law requires countries to protect European public money as they do their own.