The French investigative website Mediapart published a section of the new report 116 alleging that MEPs misused EU funds for national party purposes. The allegations come a week before the second round of the presidential election on April 24, in which Le Pen will face Emanuel Macron. A spokesman for Leppen’s far-right Rassemblement National party disputed the charges. Le Pen’s lawyer, Rodolphe Bosselut, told AFP that he was “disappointed with the way Olaf [the European anti-fraud office] acts “. He insisted that some of the reports were related to “old events, more than 10 years old”. “Marin Lepen disputes that. He disputes this without having access to the details of the accusation. It is a manipulation. “Unfortunately, I’m not surprised,” Bosselut told BFMTV. According to Mediapart, Olaf sent the report to French investigators in March. He accused Le Pen of personally allocating almost 137,000 euros from EU funds during her tenure as MEP between 2004 and 2017. Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Louis Aliot, her ex-partner and former vice president of RN, who is now mayor of Perpignan. and Bruno Gollnisch, another heavyweight in the party, also reported abusing public money. Everyone denied any wrongdoing. In an incident reported by Mediapart, Marin Lepen is said to have made a € 5,000 claim in 2010 for hotel rooms for 13 members of the far-right party to attend a conference entitled “European Regions and the Economic Crisis”. However, one of the participants allegedly wrote to the European Parliament and claimed that the meeting was used to discuss the party presidency. The anonymous participant told investigators that Le Pen had hung a European flag on the street to take pictures and then ordered colleagues to “drop this shit”. The Paris prosecutor’s office said the file was being “examined”. None of those mentioned in the report are accused of benefiting personally, but of claiming EU funds to pay for RN’s staff and events – formerly the National Front (FN). Lepen said she did not know she had done anything wrong. Lepen has been under investigation since 2018 on charges of “breach of trust” and “misuse of public funds” over the alleged use of EU money by European Parliament aides to fund the salaries of party staff. That same year, an EU court ruled that the bloc could recover more than 41,000 euros from public funds used by Le Pen to pay for her bodyguard, a former paratrooper who had been her father’s security for 20 years. Boselut said Le Pen “had not been summoned by any French judicial authority” and accused European authorities of not sending him or Le Pen the final report. He said the investigation into Olaf began in 2016 and Lepen was questioned in writing by mail in March 2021. The latest poll published by Ipsos for FranceInfo and Le Parisien shows that Macron could win next week’s second round by 10 percentage points. Both candidates are trying to attract supporters of radical left-wing candidate Jean-Luc Melanson, who failed to qualify for the second round. On Sunday, Melanson published the results of a consultation with 310,000 paid supporters on how the 7.7 million people who voted for him last week would vote next Sunday. Of the more than 215,000 who took part, almost 38% said they would vote white, while 33.4% said they would vote for Macron and just under 29% said they would abstain. “The result of this consultation is not a directive to anyone. Indicates the views of the 215,292 people who participated. “Everyone will decide and vote according to their conscience,” Mélenchon’s campaign said in a statement.
