Eight days before the second round of the presidential election, which will see Marine Le Pen once again face Emmanuel Macron, a new report from the European Union’s Anti-Fraud Office (Olaf) implicates the candidate of the National Rally. . Revealed Saturday April 16 by Mediapart (article reserved for subscribers)which publishes several screenshots of extracts from the document, the report accuses Marine Le Pen of having personally embezzled public money when she sat in the European Parliament between 2004 and 2007.
In this 116-page document, Olaf is indeed requesting reimbursement by the candidate of the RN, on a personal basis, of nearly 137,000 euros, “corresponding to various embezzlement charged by the anti-fraud body to the candidate”according to Mediapart.
In the viewfinder of this report are also three other former European deputies of the National Rally: Jean-Marie Le Pen, Louis Aliot and Bruno Gollnisch. The amount of the sums claimed amounts, in total, to more than 617,000 euros, according to Olaf.
What does the Office of fight against fraud to Marine Le Pen? “It is first of all to have diverted European public funds for national political purposes”, reports Mediapart. Among the examples cited: more than 23,000 euros worth of promotional items “which seem to have been bought for the FN congress in Lyon” in 2014, and more than 4,000 euros of bottles of Beaujolais distributed by Bruno Gollnisch during this same congress.
The Anti-Fraud Office also accuses Marine Le Pen and Ludovic de Danne, its adviser on European affairs, of having, as president and secretary general of the far-right parliamentary group Europe of Nations and Freedoms (ENL), validated requests for reimbursement of expenses incurred during party events, unrelated to the mandates of MEPs.
According to Mediapart, Marine Le Pen replied to Olaf that she was not aware of certain alleged facts and that, during her party’s events, European issues had indeed been discussed.. Or that she “didn’t see the problem” with the delivery of promotional items at party headquarters, since they “serve to promote the deputy and his ideas to the audience of his chosen land, in this case, France”.
Contacted by the investigative media, the candidate’s lawyer, Rodolphe Bosselut, assures his side that his client “ignore everything” conclusions of the Olaf report and that there is no “never had access” while she is “yet a particularly concerned person”. He also advances a supposed “lack of independence” of this European body.