Falsified documents to pretend to have a job he didn’t actually do in order to improperly receive European funds. This is the accusation that has been made against the leader of the Rassemblement National, Jordan Bardella, who allegedly pretended to have a job as a parliamentary assistant to work for the radical right-wing party. The French newspaper Libération made the accusations in an investigation that refers to events that occurred in 2015, when false documentation was allegedly produced by the French sovereignist party, then called Front National, to make the then young Bardella appear to have been a parliamentary assistant to former MEP Jean-François Jalkh, a job he did not actually do.
That year, Bardella spent several months alongside Jalkh, receiving a salary of 1,200 euros between February and June. However, according to the investigation, the politician worked for the party and not for the deputy, thus receiving the salary fraudulently. It is suspected that Bardella participated in the falsification of activity registers and press reviews, to demonstrate that he was actually working for Jalkh and not for the FN, in order to avoid charges of embezzlement.
The revelations came amid allegations that the far-right group had used EU funds between 2004 and 2016 to pay party officials rather than for parliamentary work, in breach of EU rules governing the hiring of assistants. In 2018, the Community Assembly estimated its losses at around €6.8 million.
A trial will begin on September 30 in which the party’s 27 leading figures, including former leader Jean-Marie Le Pen and his daughter Marine Le Pen, a three-time French presidential candidate, face a series of embezzlement charges. As Euractiv reports, Bardella (who has risen rapidly through the ranks of the party, becoming its president in 2021 at the age of 25, a leading candidate in European and parliamentary elections, and even proposed as a possible prime ministerial candidate) is not among the defendants.
If found guilty, each official could be fined up to €1 million, face 10 years in prison and lose the right to stand for election for up to five years. “Jordan Bardella formally denies the false accusations in the Libération article,” the party’s press office told Euractiv. The office called the accusations a “crude attempt at destabilization,” days before the start of the embezzlement trial. Le Pen has denied any wrongdoing.
