Marine Le Pen spent eight long hours on Wednesday, October 30, impassively watching her accountants slowly drown. Wednesday marked the 15th day of a trial at the Paris courthouse into her far-right party, the Rassemblement National (RN), and its assistants at the European Parliament. The court examined the party's financial machinery over allegations the Front National (FN), as it was called at the time, misappropriated funds by hiring fake assistants, through a mechanism by which the FN is suspected of having paid permanent members of its party using funding allocated by the European Parliament for the employment of MEPs' assistants.
The FN has had two successive accounting firms. The first, from 2004 to 2011, was that of Christophe Moreau, who prides himself on never having belonged to any party. His firm is a third-party payer, in other words, it drew up and signed the contracts of the MEPs and their assistants, requested the funds from Brussels, then received the European manna – €21,000 per month per MEP, then €26,000, now €30,000. The firm would then distribute the salaries to those concerned and issue the pay slips.
The task was not overwhelming: The party only had seven MEPs from 2004 to 2009, then three until 2014, and the business accounted for only 1% to 3% of Moreau's turnover. An assistant would give him the list of contracts, decided at the time by Marine Le Pen's father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Moreau would execute them without worrying too much about the movement of assistants from one MEP to another. "It was a lot of musical chairs," the expert agreed, "but I didn't know the motivation. I was just given instructions."
Was the aim to use the European envelopes to the fullest? "Not necessarily," the accountant replied, before correcting himself: "Probably." He didn't see anything shocking in it: "When I was in the army, we used to leave the engines running to deplete fuel stocks."
The party told Moreau how to split the money: "The amounts in red are the modifications: Three months of Légier [Thierry Légier, Jean-Marie Le Pen's bodyguard, a parliamentary assistant with non-existent work] on Marine, Légier's supplement on Jean-Marie Le Pen, the bonuses on the president." Moreau wasn't worried about whether MEPs and assistants were presented with a fait accompli, or about whether they were working for the party or the European Parliament. "I pursued my mission, I wasn't going to take any police measures, I don't see why I would have been suspicious." Not even when he had a false contract signed for the bodyguard, with a false pay slip to recover €41,504 in three months and sums due on another contract.
You have 54.24% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.