PARIS—Marine Le Pen convened a meeting of her party’s European Parliament lawmakers in June 2014 to discuss a vital matter: how to spend the 6.5 million euros the European Union had earmarked for them to hire assistants.
The sum was significant, more than double the entire payroll of Le Pen’s far-right party, then known as the National Front. Le Pen, according to court documents, asked the lawmakers to sign off on a system that allowed the Le Pen family to hand out contracts and cut paychecks to members of her inner circle and other party officials.
“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.”