Marine Le Pen, with her files under her arm, scored a rather striking point on Tuesday, October 15, against the European Parliament. The blow should hardly change the course of the trial of the parliamentary assistants of the National Front (FN) before the Paris criminal court, but it is a comfort – especially since it is the first. She was able to prove that the administration had made a false contract to correct an error, which senior officials in Brussels discreetly described as “a game of writing”but which turns out to be a forgery in private writing, to the tune of 41,000 euros.
Read also | Article reserved for our subscribers FN parliamentary assistants: on the first day, a trial mired in procedure
Add to your selections
The matter, it is true, is not simple. It begins with the workplace accident of Jean-Claude Surbeck, a European assistant to Marine Le Pen, who was in reality her driver. His long work stoppage was reported in France and his salary paid by Social Security, but not to the European Parliament, which continued to pay him his compensation with a rigor that honors him.
The allowances, salaries, mission expenses of deputies and their assistants are in fact managed by “a third-party payer”, Revco, an accounting firm which relieves elected officials of domestic worries. It was therefore Revco which made a first blunder by collecting the driver’s undue salaries from Parliament. However, at the same time, the parliamentary assistant contract of Ms.’s bodyguardme Le Pen had not been validated in Brussels, because the financial envelope to which the leader of the far right was entitled had already been exhausted. Revco found it clever to pay the bodyguard with the sums recovered from the driver. Except that Jean-Claude Surbeck was well paid, the bodyguard a little less: he was short of money.
Obscure explanations
The administration, already paying little attention to the shift in compensation from one to the other, should have told the third-party payer that it was sorry, but that the difference was out of its pocket. Magnanimously, she agreed to “compensate” the deficit and validated, with full knowledge of the facts, a false contract, from 1is October to December 31, 2011, with a wonderful salary for the security agent, 9,078.88 euros per month, which he obviously never received, or with charges 41,554.26 euros. But Revco recouped its costs.
Read also | Article reserved for our subscribers Marine Le Pen at the trial of FN parliamentary assistants: “You’re looking for the little beast”
Add to your selections
The case raises several problems. One, accounting, is obvious: the European Parliament has paid off a third-party payment error with taxpayers’ money and has difficulty, today, in presenting itself as the inflexible guardian of public funds. The other he made a forgery in private writing. Finally, he indirectly validated the fact that the bodyguard was indeed a parliamentary assistant, paid at five times the hourly rate: it is therefore difficult to dispute his status as an assistant today. Didier Klethi, the very rigorous Director General of Finance of the European Parliament, who usually comes to put some order into the fiery declarations of the defense with remarkable authority, launched, on Tuesday, into obscure explanations, which left the court speechless, and the journalists without notes.
You have 42.05% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
