The Embezzlement Scheme That Led to Le Pen’s Elections Ban

“What Marine is asking us is equivalent to signing for fictitious jobs,” one of the lawmakers, Jean-Luc Schaffhauser, wrote in an email at the time to the party’s then-treasurer, Wallerand de Saint-Just. “And it is the lawmaker who is criminally responsible for his or her own money, even if the party is the beneficiary of it.”

De Saint-Just, a trained lawyer who had groomed Le Pen to lead the party, responded: “I believe that Marine knows all this.”

Le Pen’s instructions to lawmakers were at the center of an embezzlement trial that ended this past Monday with judges banning one of France’s most prominent politicians from future elections, including the next presidential race.

President Trump and other nationalist leaders around the world have railed against France’s judiciary over the ban, claiming that the ruling is part of an effort by leftist elites to weaponize justice systems against their political opponents and subvert democracy. Trump himself has dismissed Le Pen’s trial as a witch hunt stemming from a “bookkeeping error” that “she probably knew nothing about.”

A review of court documents, email and testimony from her trial shows Le Pen was at the heart of a system to create contracts that directed a total of €4.4 million, the equivalent of $4.8 million, in EU funding to members of the Le Pen family and the party’s staff in France between 2004 and 2016. The contracts benefited among others Le Pen’s sister Yann Le Pen; her former sister-in-law and close friend, Catherine Griset; and Thierry Légier, who worked as a personal bodyguard for Le Pen and her late father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the party’s co-founder. Légier’s assistant contracts, on their own, cost the European Parliament more than €717,000.

Le Pen didn’t enrich herself, judges wrote in their ruling. Still, the payments “constitute a democratic circumvention that consists of a double deception, at the expense of the European Parliament and the electorate,” the judges added, describing the contracts as “fictitious.”

Le Pen didn’t respond to a request for comment. In her testimony, Le Pen said the contracts were designed to compensate aides who had wide-ranging roles that spanned from assistant work in the Parliament to tasks for the party that she said they were free to perform on a voluntary basis.

“Back then, the rules either didn’t exist or were much more flexible,” Le Pen said.

Le Pen has zeroed in on the judges’ decision to impose the ban with immediate effect. Since the appeals process in France usually takes years, Le Pen said the immediate ban effectively leaves her little chance to overturn the ruling before the 2027 presidential election. Le Pen was positioned to enter that race as a front-runner because President Emmanuel Macron is term-limited.

“The judge’s goal is to prevent me from being elected president of the republic,” Le Pen told a meeting of lawmakers after the ruling.

As the criticism from Le Pen mounted, the country’s appellate courts took the unusual step of publicly setting a timeline to review Le Pen’s case before the 2027 election starts. In addition to the ban, Le Pen received a four-year prison sentence for embezzlement. Half of that term was suspended, judges said, adding that she could serve the remaining two years by using an electronic bracelet.

The court found Yann Le Pen, Griset and Légier guilty of receiving embezzled funds, sentencing each to a 12-month suspended prison term and a two-year ban from running for office. Griset and Légier didn’t respond to requests for comment. Yann Le Pen couldn’t be reached for comment.

De Saint-Just, the former treasurer, was convicted of being complicit in embezzlement. He received a three-year prison sentence, one year of which was suspended, and a three-year ban from running for office.

Reached by phone, de Saint-Just denied involvement in the scheme, saying he didn’t recall the email exchange with Schaffhauser. De Saint-Just said he interpreted his email stating that Le Pen “knows all this” as a reference to Le Pen’s knowing the rules of the European Parliament.

“I was blowing him off,” de Saint-Just said of the lawmaker.

Scrutiny of Le Pen’s practices began in June 2014, when the EU’s antifraud office received an anonymous tip, questioning the role of at least two of the party’s European Parliament assistants. The antifraud office conducted an inquiry and alerted French prosecutors in Paris, recommending that they open a probe. The prosecutors took no action.

Then, in February 2015, the National Front published an organizational chart for its national operations based in Nanterre, on the outskirts of Paris.

Martin Schulz, a German socialist who at the time served as president of the European Parliament, noticed that many people listed as National Front officials on the organizational chart were also under contract as parliamentary assistants. He flagged the issue to the EU’s antifraud office and to French prosecutors, who launched an investigation.

Prosecutors searched a number of locations, including the party’s headquarters and the home of Le Pen’s father. They seized documents that showed Jean-Marie Le Pen had created a system that centralized party’s payments to assistants in 2004. Under the system, the National Front’s lawmakers were expected to sign assistant contracts handled by a third-party payments provider that Jean-Marie Le Pen directed to distribute the money.