The Penelopegate, with the suspicions of fictitious employment around the role of his wife, had probably cost the defeat of François Fillon in 2017. What will it be for Fabien Roussel?
According to Mediapart, the communist candidate for the presidential election would have been parliamentary attaché of a deputy from 2009 to 2014. Problem: impossible to find trace of his work in the National Assembly.
Worse still: documents, consulted by the newspaper, show that Fabien Roussel worked during this time for the French Communist Party.
According to information from Mediapart, Fabien Roussel was therefore between 2009 and 2014 the parliamentary attaché of Jean-Jacques Candelier, communist deputy for the 16th district of the North.
He is then paid 3,000 euros net per month for this work, or nearly a third of the envelope allocated to the deputy to remunerate his team, reports the newspaper.
He is at the same time, from 2010, at the head of the northern federation of the PCF, "as an activist and volunteer", he told Mediapart.
“I fed his work, his speeches, his questions to the government from my work with the social and political actors of the department and his constituency.
I traveled to the places of struggle, met political activists, trade unions, associations and employees in order to feed the action and the ground anchoring of my deputy ”, defended himself, with Mediapart, Fabien Roussel.
No proof of work done
Neither Fabien Roussel nor Jean-Jacques Candelier could provide proof to Mediapart that the first had worked well for the second.
Fabien Roussel "worked on important files of the National Assembly", however affirmed the deputy, without being able to go into detail.
However, according to the newspaper, a year after leaving the National Assembly in 2017, the deputy would have recognized during a conversation that the situation of Fabien Roussel "was not too clear".
Several ex-collaborators of the former deputy were not more able to provide proof of the work of Fabien Roussel.
In a video, resurfacing on social networks with the revelations of Mediapart, Fabien Roussel estimated in 2017, after the François Fillon case, that “the problem is more that of fictitious jobs” than that of family jobs.
And the one who was then a deputy from the North concluded, facing the National Assembly: “What matters is all the same to provide real work when remuneration is provided for by law.
»
“The problem is more that of fictitious jobs” than that of family jobs, explained the deputy Roussel.
pic.twitter.com/UntVkWEO1l
— Nabil Touati (@salam93) February 20, 2022
The communist presidential candidate has experienced renewed interest since the end of January and his defense of “French gastronomy” being defined according to him with “good wine, good meat, good cheese”.
In the polls, Fabien Roussel is now credited with almost 5% of the vote, alongside the environmental candidate Yannick Jadot, ahead of Christiane Taubira and Anne Hidalgo.