Le Pen and her cronies were found guilty because of hard evidence by some of the sharpest financial investigators operating in France today, writes Nabila Ramdani [photo credit: Getty Images]
During a long career in public life dominated by high-profile TV appearances, the forthright Marine Le Pen always used to rail against financial sleaze.
She once famously went on camera to attack fellow politicians caught up in stealing scandals, saying: “The French are fed up with seeing elected officials embezzling money.”
Despite being a rising star in a party rooted in crimes including racism and Holocaust denial, Le Pen said: “Everyone stole money from the coffers except the National Front, and we think that’s normal?”
This happened to be in 2004 – the year Le Pen first entered the European Parliament as an MEP, and secretly began embezzling millions of euros worth of taxpayers’ cash in a manner that would have impressed the Mafia.
The scam came to an end after an enquiry was launched – one which lasted more than a decade and ultimately led to Le Pen being sentenced to four years in prison last week and, crucially, being banned from standing for public office for the next five years.
This will cover 2027, when the far-Right Le Pen would have been a clear favourite to replace Emmanuel Macron as President of France. There is now a bitter legal row taking place, as Le Pen tries to overturn the ban, and indeed her conviction for “embezzling public funds”.
The scale and duration of the Le Pen racket was extraordinary – for at least 12 years up until 2016, cash that should have been used to pay staff in Brussels or Strasbourg was instead siphoned off to Paris.
There it was used to fund National Front (FN for Front National) staff who had absolutely nothing to do with the European Parliament – an institution that notoriously insular and xenophobic party members including Le Pen despised, along with the entire European project.
Lawyers have irrefutable proof that Le Pen herself played the “central role” and directly created at least eight fake contracts worth almost €500,000.
She was firmly portrayed as the lead criminal, as she “instigated the corrupt system”, with “authority and determination”, according to prosecutors. It was a time when the FN was in serious financial difficulties and borrowing money off all kinds of controversial sponsors, including a Russian bank. In which case, accusations that Le Pen’s conviction for embezzlement – alongside some 24 other defendants linked to the FN – is part of a conspiracy by Left-Wing judges is absolutely preposterous.
Subscribe Now and Listen to our Podcasts OnLe Pen and her cronies were found guilty because of hard evidence by some of the sharpest financial investigators operating in France today. Foremost among them was Bénédicte de Perthuis, the highly respected financial crimes specialist who was president of the three-judge bench at Le Pen’s trial.
That an armed police guard was strengthened around Judge De Perthuis’s home following the verdict after she received alarming “personal threats” says everything about the abiding thuggishness of many who now support the FN, which has changed its name to the National Rally (RN for Rassemblement National).
The judge spent months listening to Le Pen, herself a barrister, as she desperately tried to mitigate the indefensible. There was a pivotal moment in the trial on November 6th last year, when Le Pen began to emote about the prosecution’s “unfair methods”. Judge De Perthuis, a qualified actuary renowned for untangling complex financial positions, told her: “This isn’t politics, this is a criminal court”.
Far from being a corrupt political judgment – as manipulative commentators from American presidential advisor Elon Musk to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban have suggested – Le Pen’s conviction was nothing less than a clear application of the law.
Rather than a snap, surprise decision, it was the result of five months of deliberation by the judges, following a 12-year enquiry carried out by numerous other objective parties, including the European Parliament’s Anti-Fraud Office.
Like father, like daughter: The Le Pen legacy
A particularly disturbing aspect of the case is the way close associates of the Le Pen family – the heart and soul of the dynastic party – received high salaries from the stolen cash.
While Le Pen is not said to have benefited personally, her RN has always been a financial juggernaut for her immediate family, not least of all party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Marine Le Pen’s father, who died earlier this year at the age of 96, made multi-millions from his political work, and there is no doubt that all of his children did very well out of it too.
Were it not for ill health towards the end of his life, Le Pen Senior – a convicted racist, Islamophobe and anti-Semite – would certainly have been in the dock. While he was alive, he followed the case, knowing full well that France was rightly clamping down on politicians who could not be trusted with public money.
Beyond plenty of Right-Wingers, such as former Prime Minister François Fillon, and disgraced ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy, these included Leftists such as the former Socialist Budget Minister Jérôme Cahuzac. He was sentenced to three years in prison for tax fraud in 2016 and – crucially – exactly the same five years of ineligibility that is part of Le Pen’s punishment.
In the Le Pen judgment, it is noted that her crimes “circumnavigate democratic functioning” and were an “attack on public trust”. The judges cited a 2015 report by Jean-Louis Nadal, former president of France’s High Authority for Transparency in Public Life, who noted: “It is simply a matter of requiring, first and foremost, that public officials respect the rules that apply to everyone.” Specifically, if anyone is caught regularly and ruthlessly stealing money in a particular job, then they should be banned from doing that job.
The latest opinion polls concur. An Odoxa-Backbone one for Le Figaro reveals that 65% of French citizens say they are “not shocked” by the Le Pen verdict. Just as significantly, 61% of those surveyed approve of Le Pen’s conviction. They consider it “a sign that our democracy is functioning well,” and that she was treated like any other French citizen.
Such simple logic should be contrasted with the hyperbolic nonsense coming from Le Pen as she encourages supporters of her populist party to take to the streets to fight for her future. During a highly charged crisis meeting at the National Assembly on Thursday, Le Pen said with a straight face: “The establishment has dropped the nuclear bomb.” In fact, Le Pen is entirely responsible for the likely destruction of her entire career, and it is about time she finally acknowledged this, while showing some remorse for her appalling crimes.
Nabila Ramdani is a French-Algerian Journalist, Broadcaster and Academic & Author of Fixing France: How to Repair a Broken Republic (PublicAffairs/Hurst).
Follow her on Twitter: @NabilaRamdani
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.