François Bayrou appointed Prime Minister but still under threat of trial in the affair of the MoDem European parliamentary assistants

The president of MoDem was acquitted in February, but the prosecution appealed this decision. The date for a second trial has still not been set.

It’s a sword of Damocles that still hangs over his head. François Bayrou, appointed Prime Minister on Friday December 13, is still being prosecuted in the affair of the MoDem European parliamentary assistants. He was tried at first instance in the fall of 2023, as president of the UDF, then of the MoDem, for “complicity by instigation of embezzlement of public funds” between 2005 and 2017.

At the end of the trial, the Paris criminal court announced, on February 5, its decision to release him, “for the benefit of the doubt”. But three days later, the prosecution appealed, considering “that the facts characterize the offenses charged and that the evidence of these offenses is gathered against all the defendants”. The new Prime Minister must therefore be tried a second time. However, the date of the appeal trial has not been set. If François Bayrou was still at Matignon when it was held, this would be a first for a serving Prime Minister.

In this case, François Bayrou, tried alongside ten other people, executives and centrist elected officials, is accused of having misappropriated European funds in order to use them to pay parliamentary assistants who in reality worked for the UDF and then the Modem. On the basis of testimonies from former employees, documents from European authorities, emails and notes discovered during searches, two judges uncovered, after six years of investigation, a “fraudulent mechanism”. François Bayrou has always contested the existence of a “system”.

If the Paris criminal court recognized the misappropriation of public funds with the remuneration of parliamentary assistants from the funds of the European Parliament to carry out tasks for the benefit of the parties, it nevertheless underlined that“there is no evidence to support this” that the president of the centrist party “was aware of the non-execution of parliamentary assistant contracts”. The court acquitted two other defendants, but sentenced eight people to suspended prison sentences and a two-year suspended ineligibility.

A preliminary investigation was opened at the beginning of June 2017, shortly after the appointment of François Bayrou as Minister of Justice. The one who was to carry the bill on the moralization of public life, one of the priority projects of the Head of State after a presidential campaign marred by business, had to resign on June 21, just like other MoDem ministers. Emmanuel Macron’s choice to part ways with ministers worried by the justice system then evolved during his second term.