Former minister Michèle Alliot-Marie was sentenced on Friday by the Nanterre criminal court to six months of suspended imprisonment for illegal taking of interests from 2010 to 2012, when she was deputy mayor of Saint-Jean-de-Luz (Pyrénées-Atlantiques).
The former Minister of Defense, Interior, Justice and Foreign Affairs under Jacques Chirac and then Nicolas Sarkozy, now aged 77, was absent from the deliberations. Her lawyers immediately announced that they would appeal.
The court considered that this illegal taking of interest was “indirect” and “measured” due to the total amount identified in the procedure, the president detailed in rendering the decision, describing the sentence handed down as a “warning”.
On July 2, the prosecution requested a two-year suspended prison sentence for Ms. Alliot-Marie, as well as a fine of 50,000 euros and ineligibility for three years.
The court did not impose a fine or a sentence of ineligibility. The judges did not consider it “necessary” to prohibit the former minister from being elected “in consideration of the age of the facts, the defendant’s withdrawal from political life, and the fact that it was not a mandatory additional sentence at the time” of the facts.
“We are in total disagreement with this decision,” said Rémi Lorrain, one of Ms Alliot-Marie’s lawyers, to AFP, who assured that the former minister “always acted in the interest of Saint-Jean-de-Luz and the community.”
Me Christophe Ingrain, his other counsel, stressed that in its reasons, the court “indicated that there was no personal enrichment and that it is a conviction in principle, for very old facts”.
The suspicion of illegal taking of interests at the heart of this case is based on “the fact of having been able to vote for (municipal) subsidies, some of which were likely to be subsequently passed on to the Association for the Organisation of Festivals (AOF)”, chaired by Mrs Alliot-Marie’s father, Bernard Marie, the president summarised during the trial.
At the time, Ms Alliot-Marie participated in the voting on municipal subsidies as deputy mayor.
In the justice system’s sights more specifically, the subsidy intended for the Saint-Jean-de-Luz Tourist Office, which paid the AOF through an agreement renewed year after year in the form of services for the organization of a film festival.
According to evidence collected by investigators, this association received more than 260,000 euros in its bank account between January 2010 and October 2012, notably from the Tourist Office.
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