Michel Mercier is suspected of having granted fictitious parliamentary jobs to his wife and daughter, “intolerable” facts committed by a politician who “ceded to ease and comfort”, according to the accusation.
Le Monde with AFP
suspected of having granted fictitious parliamentary jobs to his wife and daughter, the ex-guard of the 75-year-old seals, who denied any desire to do badly for four days of debate, did not take away The conviction of the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF). Four years’ imprisonment, one year firm, were required on Wednesday November 9 against Michel Mercier.
The accusation also called to pronounce against Mr. Mercier, tried for “embezzlement of public funds” and “illegal taking of interest”, an ineligibility of ten years, accompanied by a ban on any public service for five years and a fine of 50,000 euros. Against his wife, Joëlle, and his daughter Delphine, who appeared with him before the Paris Criminal Court for “concealment”, sentences of two years suspended and eighteen months suspended respectively were required.
During a long and severe indictment, the prosecutor called on Wednesday to sanction “facts all the more intolerable as they were committed by a man invested in politics for forty years”. The magistrate also denounced “the most total contradictions and artistic vagueness” in the explanations of Michel Mercier, reproaching the attitude at the helm of this close to François Bayrou, “who opts for the dodge and the responses against current “.
m. Mercier is tried “for having given in to ease, comfort”, further gone the accusation, which noted the significant sums at stake: nearly 450,000 euros of public money in total, according to the PNF count, which Takes into account the requests of the General Council of the Rhône, which estimates at 96,000 euros the expenses incurred by Joëlle Mercier at the expense of the department. 2> “particularly serious facts”
Likely Matois, Michel Mercier had presented himself at the helm as a “senator from a rural environment”, at the door still open, who therefore needed the assistance of his family, especially his wife, To fulfill his political functions.
Facts alleged against the former minister of Nicolas Sarkozy (2010-2012) extended from 2005 to 2014, when family parliamentary jobs were not yet prohibited. They have been so since summer 2017, and the resounding affair Fillon, which hovers above this trial. During this period when family jobs were, according to him, “frequent”, Michel Mercier employed his wife as a parliamentary assistant when he was a senator between 2005 and 2013, even if the latter collaborated with him since 1999 – facts prescribed today. But no one seemed to know, within the Department of the Rhône, that Joëlle Mercier was the parliamentary assistant of her husband.
Delphine, the daughter of Michel Mercier was the parliamentary assistant of her father from August 2012 to April 2014 when she lived in London. She led a “watch mission” on cultural subjects for this one, she explained, but she was not able to provide traces corresponding to this work.
Joëlle Mercier is also continued for organizing, at the expense of the General Council of the Rhône, of which her husband was at the time the president, of “events”, ranging from cooking or fencing to cultural visits, which have benefited several hundred people, mostly wives from Rhodanian notables. The accusation considered that “given her professional experience, she could not ignore that she was committing particularly serious facts”.
The investigation had been opened in August 2017 after an article in the Duck chained and had led the ex-Garden of the Seals, now 75 years old, to give up the seat which was then promised to the Constitutional Council. “I consider (…) that I will not be able to sit with the necessary serenity,” he said. The former minister and senator remains in question in another file of fictitious jobs. Since 2019, he has been indicted in the case of MEPs’ assistants from the Modem alongside other executives of the centrist party, including François Bayrou.