Mr. Marquis Wallerand de Saint-Just d'Autingues has long experience in the courtrooms and knows how to courteously answer the question. Not only because he was the lawyer for forty years of the National Front (FN) and subsidiarily that of Brigitte Bardot, but because the party's treasurer has already been sentenced in 2023 to six months suspended sentence and a sentence of ineligibility of two years for “concealment of abuse of social assets” in the Jeanne affair, a clever arrangement to finance the 2012 legislative elections.
Mᵉ Saint-Just, 74 years old, – who has little connection with Robespierre's close friend, except that they were both elected in Aisne and stumbled into Paris – willingly wraps herself in her good faith and was outraged, Monday November 4, at the trial of the assistants of the European Parliament, at the slightest infamous suspicion. He was treasurer, volunteer, of the FN from 2009 and for twelve years, member of the political bureau, then of the executive bureau, and even vice-president, and employee of the party from 2014 for legal and judicial affairs. Since joining the FN in 1986, he has presented himself in all elections, “except in the presidency of the Republic”jokes the defendant.
In 2016, the financial situation of the FN was not brilliant, expenses increased in three years from 140,000 to 662,000 euros, the debt exceeded 9.1 million. “We especially had a cash flow problem, pleads the lawyer. In truth, the situation of the movement was healthy and will only improve. » In the meantime, costs must be reduced and the prosecution suspects him of having wanted to take advantage of the European windfall to relieve the party's finances, by hiring fictitious assistants.
Read also | Article reserved for our subscribers At the trial of FN parliamentary assistants, Marine Le Pen relishes the errors of the European Parliament
Read later
The clues abound. He did not see malice in Parliament paying 21,000 euros of severance pay to Jean-Marie Le Pen's bodyguard, when he changed his parliamentary assistant contract, nor when the devoted secretary of president became on paper assistant to Bruno Gollnisch. He no longer knows whether he had noticed that Marine Le Pen's chief of staff was also assigned to Strasbourg or whether Yann Maréchal, Marine's sister, who was in charge of major demonstrations at headquarters, had followed the same path.
Read also | Article reserved for our subscribers At the trial of FN parliamentary assistants, the testimony of accountants: “The false can become the true”
Read later
“To be aware is not to be complicit! »
The president of the court puts an email under his nose which proves that Marine Le Pen's driver was paid as a parliamentary assistant, the old lawyer at first does not remember it, then assures “that being aware is not being complicit!” » and protests with the habit that comes from long attendance at the bar: “A fictitious job, in French, is a person who does no work, I am quite shocked by this deviation in the language! »
You have 47.35% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
