On Wednesday 7 March, the General Court of the EU confirmed the decisions taken by the European Parliament in February 2017 to recover the sum of nearly €600,000 paid out for fictitious parliamentary assistants' expenses from two French MEPs – Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front and Bruno Gollnisch, non-attached to a parliamentary group (Cases T-140/16 and T-624/16).
In January 2016, the European Parliament had decided that the sum of €320 026.23 had been unduly paid to Jean-Marie Le Pen during the seventh legislature to cover parliamentary assistance. In July 2016, Parliament also decided that the sum of €275 984.23 had been unduly paid to Bruno Gollnisch for the very same reasons.
In its rulings, the General Court confirms the Parliament’s decisions (see EUROPE 11727). In particular, it considers that: - the Parliament secretary general is competent for adopting decisions to recover the sums unduly paid in matters affecting the status of MEPs; - it is up to the MEPs, and not the Parliament, to prove that the amounts received were used to cover expenses effectively incurred and resulting entirely and exclusively from the employment of assistants; - no element of the Parliament’s decisions allows one to consider that Parliament had considered the function of parliamentary assistance, in itself, incompatible with the activities of political activists; - the MEPs in question were not the subject of discriminatory and partial treatment.
In June 2016, Parliament had also called on Mylène Troszczynski (ENF, France) to reimburse the sum of €56,554 unduly paid to her to cover parliamentary assistance expenses. The case (T-626/16), which has recently been the subject of a plea, is ongoing. (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)