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Marine Le Pen: Your lawyer denies the allegations
Photo: LUDOVIC MARIN/POOL/EPA
After allegations of breach of trust against the right-wing populist French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen and other ex-EU MPs became known, the EU Parliament wants to claim back amounts wrongly paid.
In total, it is about "617,000 euros wrongly paid," said a representative of the EU Parliament on Sunday of the AFP news agency.
Parliament will continue with the "reclaims" in the coming weeks.
A week before the decisive round of the French presidential election, allegations of fraud from Brussels have put challenger Marine Le Pen under pressure.
Amidst the preparations for the only and possibly decisive television duel with incumbent Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday, the news broke that the EU anti-fraud agency accused Olaf of the right-wing populist and some of her confidants of embezzlement.
The French news portal "Mediapart" published the Olaf report on Saturday, according to which Le Pen is said to have siphoned off EU funds of around 137,000 euros during her time as an MEP between 2004 and 2017 for domestic purposes and personal expenses, among other things.
Three other former MEPs are also accused, including her father Jean-Marie Le Pen. Marine Le Pen is also said to have provided party members with bogus jobs as assistants in the European Parliament.
The Paris prosecutor confirmed to the AFP news agency that they received the report on March 11 and are currently examining it.
Bad timing for Le Pen: The allegations come just days before the TV duel
Le Pen's lawyer, meanwhile, has denied the allegations.
Rodolphe Bosselut said it was an "instrumentalization" just before the presidential runoff on Sunday.
Despite age-old allegations, Marine Le Pen was "not summoned by any French judicial authority."
Neither he nor his client had received the final report of the investigation launched in 2016, the lawyer added.
The allegations come at an inconvenient time for Macron's rival.
Four days before the runoff election, the only television debate with the 44-year-old incumbent will take place on Wednesday.
The debate gives her the chance to correct the "fake news" that has been spread about her, said the right-wing populist on Saturday during an election campaign in Normandy.
The 53-year-old was convinced that this time she was better prepared for the television debate than for the duel during the 2017 presidential campaign. Back then, Macron gave his opponent no chance in front of the cameras.
A few days later he won the runoff by a clear margin.
Macron expressed his confidence on television channel TF1 that he could win the duel again: "I think I have a convincing plan that deserves to be known and I have the feeling that it is on the side of the extreme right project that deserves to be explained in more detail«.
According to the latest polls, 53 to 55.5 percent of the vote next Sunday would go to Macron and 44.5 to 47 percent to Marine Le Pen. Up to a quarter of the French could therefore stay away from the ballot box.
There are still many undecided, especially among the almost eight million voters who pushed the left-wing populist candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon to third place with his ecologically oriented program in the first round.
In a poll of almost 215,300 supporters commissioned by Mélenchon's party, only a third said they wanted to vote for Macron.
Apparently, especially with a view to the Mélenchon supporters, Macron promised if he was re-elected that environmental protection would be the focus of his future policy.
He will ensure that France is the "first major nation to get out of oil, gas and coal," he said at a campaign rally on Saturday in Marseille, southern France.
xvc/AFP
