With her files under her arm, on Tuesday, Octber 15, Marine Le Pen chalked up a point against the European Parliament, in the trial concerning the far-right Front National (FN, now named the Rassemblement National, RN) party’s EU parliamentary assistants, being held at the Paris Criminal Court. Her move is unlikely to change the course of the trial, but it does represent a small symbolic victory: She was able to prove that the administration had drawn up a fake contract to correct an error. What the Brussels officials had described as being a mere change on paper, turned out to be the forgery of a private document – to the tune of €41,000.

The forgery began with an accident suffered at work by Jean-Claude Surbeck, Marine Le Pen’s then-MEP assistant, who actually served as her chauffeur. French authorities were notified of his long leave period, and his salary was thus paid by the French Social Security system (under the rules for leave in such a case). However, the European Parliament was not made aware of his leave, and continued to pay him his allowance rigorously. The allowances, salaries and mission expenses of the MEPs and their assistants were actually managed by a “third-party payer,” Revco, a chartered accountants’ firm, which helps elected representatives deal with their administrative concerns.

Revco had, therefore, made the initial blunder, by cashing in the wages that the chauffeur was unduly receiving from Parliament. Yet, at the same time, the parliamentary assistant contract for Le Pen’s bodyguard had not been fully approved by Brussels, because the allowance budget the far-right leader was entitled to had already run dry. Revco had decided it would be a clever move to pay the bodyguard using some of the money the chauffeur was receiving. Surbeck had been very well paid, and the bodyguard had been earning a little less, due to the lack of remaining funds.

Obscure explanations

The administration, which was already rather unbothered about the allowance payments being shifted from one person to the other, should have notified Revco that it was their responsibility to make up the difference. It magnanimously agreed to “compensate” the shortfall, and knowingly signed off on a fake contract, dated from October 1 to December 31, 2011, including a substantial salary for the security guard, €9,078.88 per month – which he never received, with Revco rather drawing on its funds.

The European Parliament, whose representatives at the trial have claimed to be inflexible guardians of the French Treasury, had therefore used taxpayers’ money to make up for a third-party payer error. It had forged a private document, and indirectly approved the fact that the bodyguard was indeed a parliamentary assistant, one paid at five times the hourly rate: It would, therefore, be difficult to contest his status as an assistant today. Didier Klethi, the European Parliament’s rigorous director-general for finance, who would usually bring some measure of order to the defense’s heated statements with remarkable authority, launched into unclear explanations on Tuesday, which left the court speechless, and the journalists with nothing to write down.

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