Former socialist minister Bruno Le Roux began trial on Wednesday by a Paris criminal court, specifically for allegedly employing his two daughters fictitiously as collaborators when he was deputy, a case that forced him to immediately leave the Interior Ministry.
Bruno Le Roux also appeared on suspicion of misappropriation of compensation representing mandate fees (IRFM).
The National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF) opened, in 2017, a preliminary investigation into the employment of his two daughters as parliamentary collaborators between 2009 and 2017 when he was deputy of Seine-Saint-Denis, facts revealed by “Quotidien” in the TMC.
Contract 64,000 euros
The show found that his two daughters had accumulated 14 and 10 fixed-term contracts respectively during this period when they were still high school students and then students. PNF calculated that the total amount of these contracts amounted to more than 64,000 euros.
In his opening statement, the former politician, who now runs a consulting firm, said he was “relieved, because eight years and seven months is a long time before he can come and explain himself”.
This affair, which coincided with Penelope Fillon’s fictional employment scandal, forced him to resign as Minister of the Interior, approximately four months after his appointment and less than a month before the presidential election.
As the leader, the former elected official, aged 60, explained that he had hired his daughter as a parliamentary collaborator during a “tense” period, related to his divorce from their mother, during which their relationship became distant.
The idea is “to let them know You’ll work with me, you’ll see what I do, you’ll get to know who else I work with, and by chance we’ll run into each other. “, he explained.
“It’s true that right now, given the debate we’re having, I can understand why people say to themselves: Isn’t there a side of nepotism? “, he admitted, while assuring that there was “no desire to hide” their work and that they had “things to do, real work”.
Contract not completed yet?
Sorting, filing, creating files, preparing wishes… “There is always something to do in the parliament office,” he explains.
The court questioned him at length about the title of the mission stated on each fixed-term contract, about the fact that for certain contracts, they worked from home, at times when remote work was not appropriate, or even about the fact that they went on holiday or for an internship on the same dates.
“We have the impression that most of these contracts have not been implemented,” said an assessing judge.
“The only question that matters is not the contract between me, the employer, and them, the workers. The question is the effectiveness of the work done, the work done at all times,” he replied.
The chief justice was surprised by the lack of evidence in the files to support this work, and observed that Bruno Le Roux’s daughters had been paid “very handsomely for many years”. The trial continues on Thursday.
