Marine Le Pen in trouble with EU justice. The Community Court of Justice, with a sentence arrived today, 19 June, confirmed “the decision of the European Parliament to recover from MEP Marine Le Pen, about 300 thousand euros which she attributed to the employment of a parliamentary assistant. Le Pen - writes the Court - did not demonstrate that the assistant actually worked.
The former leader of the Front National (now Rassemblement National) and former French presidential candidate failed to convince the judges to overturn the decision taken by the European Parliament on 5 December 2016 which obliges Le Pen, MEP from 2009 to 2017, to return 298.497,87 euros unduly received as parliamentary assistance.
In detail, between December 2010 and February 2016, the Strasbourg assembly allegedly paid almost 300 euros for a female collaborator employed by Le Pen as a local parliamentary assistant. According to the judges, the French leader would not have been able to provide any evidence that the aforementioned assistant carried out a job directly and exclusively linked to her mandate in Europe. In other words, during his mandate as MEP Le Pen allegedly misused European funds to pay someone who never existed or whose existence he was unable to prove in any case.
