A nebulous affair involving all the executives of the National Rally (RN). Starting September 30, 27 members of the far-right party will be tried by the Paris Criminal Court. They are suspected of having organized and participated in a vast system of embezzlement of public funds in the European Parliament.
Although the current president of the RN, Jordan Bardella, is not among the accused (unlike the other leading figure of the party, Marine Le Pen), Libération published revelations this Monday linking him to this affair. But what exactly is Jordan Bardella accused of and, more generally, why is his party going to appear before the courts in a few days?
27 RN members accused of embezzlement
The facts that will be examined during the upcoming trial date back to a period (between 2004 and 2017) when the RN was still called the National Front (FN). As summarized by the Nouvel Obs, the 27 defendants (11 former FN MEPs, 12 former parliamentary assistants and 4 party collaborators) are accused of misappropriation of public funds and/or complicity. As a legal entity, the far-right party is accused of complicity and concealment of misappropriation of public funds.
These embezzlements concern the envelopes allocated by the European Union (EU) to each deputy to pay parliamentary assistants, representing 21,000 euros per month at the expense of the European taxpayer. The French justice system suspects the FN of having used this financial windfall, for several years, to pay fictitious parliamentary assistants.
The total damage would amount to 6.8 million euros of public money.
Thus, according to the order of the investigating judges in charge of the investigation, the people paid with these envelopes of public money would not have worked at the European Parliament, but directly at the headquarters of the FN, in the service of the extreme right party. The FN general staff would also have used this money to pay off pre-existing debts or settle unpaid bills.
According to calculations by the European Parliament, which has filed a civil suit, the damages amount to €6.8 million over the period 2009-2017. This would therefore not be a case of one or two isolated discrepancies, but rather, in the words of the investigating judges, a real “system of embezzlement” orchestrated “in a concerted and deliberate manner” by the leadership of the FN, occupied by Jean-Marie Le Pen until 2011, then by Marine Le Pen.
Jordan Bardella assistant to a FN MEP in 2015, a fictitious job?
The founder of the far-right party and his daughter are also among the accused in this trial, as are other FN leaders: Bruno Gollnisch, Louis Aliot, Wallerand de Saint-Just, Nicolas Bay and Julien Odoul. A member of the European Parliament since 2019, the current president of the RN Jordan Bardella is not on this list.
However, according to Libération journalist Tristan Berteloot, Jordan Bardella could also have been investigated by the courts for an alleged fictitious job as a parliamentary assistant. As indicated by Le Nouvel Obs, the latter was officially the assistant of former MEP Jean-François Jalkh between February and June 2015, as part of a part-time fixed-term contract. However, according to a source cited by Libération, Jordan Bardella “did nothing when he was an assistant” and was instead working for the FN leadership at the time.
‘Fake proof of work dossier’ to protect party’s rising star
In a book to be published on September 13th entitled The Winning Machine – Revelations on the RN on the march towards the ElyséeTristan Berteloot returns to this episode in particular and states that in 2017, at the time when the French justice system began investigating suspicions of embezzlement, “the name of Jordan Bardella did appear in the investigators’ file”. The far-right party then allegedly organized a “counter-attack” to ensure that the party’s rising star was not worried in this affair.
A member of Jean-François Jalkh’s team was thus tasked with putting together a file to prove that Bardella had actually worked for Jalkh during the period of his fixed-term contract. However, according to Tristan Berteloot, this famous file would be a “file of bogus proof of work, backdated to the period when Jordan Bardella was hired as an assistant. Fake documents, for a fictitious job.”
Jordan Bardella allegedly “hand-signed” several false documents
Among the “fake documents” in this file, Tristan Berteloot mentions in particular a press review doctored with “blanco” and a diary on which Jordan Bardella allegedly “summarily scribbled a few events linked to Jalkh’s mandate, dates of plenary meetings, trips to Brussels, to make people believe that he was following his diary or accompanying him at several times”.
According to the investigation by the journalist from Libération, these false proofs of work were notably produced under the direction of a Belgian lawyer named Ghislain Dubois, who worked as a parliamentary assistant to Jean-François Jalkh in 2017. Tristan Berteloot in any case directly implicates Jordan Bardella in this affair by affirming that the current president of the RN would have “initialed by hand” some of these false documents.
Following these revelations, Jordan Bardella reacted on the social network X, denouncing “false and defamatory” accusations. “Neither the European Parliament nor the French Justice system had found fault with the reality of my work,” the MEP added.
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