National Rally denies making illegal payments in embezzlement trial
Published on 01/10/2024 - 10:40 GMT+2•Updated 10:55
Prosecutors say the alleged embezzlement of European funds makes French and European taxpayers victims of malfeasance.
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 EU 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.