Four years in prison, including farm, required against Michel Mercier

The national financial prosecutor’s office has set a severe observation against the former Minister of Justice, accused of embezzlement of public funds, but only required a firm sentence, to be purged at home.

by Franck Johannès

The prosecution had very harsh words against the Mercier family, whole “of personal enrichment”, but he finally required relatively moderate sentences. Former senator Michel Mercier, former Minister of Justice, risked ten years in prison for three “embezzlement of public funds” and an “illegal takeover of interest”: the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF) required, Wednesday, November 9, that four, including three suspended, and the possibility of serving the conviction of one year at home, with an electronic bracelet. He also required ten -year ineligibility against him – but Michel Mercier is 75 years old -, the ban on any public service for five years and a fine of 50,000 euros.

For two of his parliamentary assistants, his wife Joëlle and his daughter Delphine, accused of fictitious jobs, the PNF claimed two years suspended and 50,000 euros fine for the wife, and eighteen months with Subsis and 10,000 euros for his daughter, without mention to her criminal record so as not to hypothequate his teaching profession.

“The political class has long had a separate treatment, which allowed him to free himself from the common rules, recognized Aurélien Letocard, first vice-prosecutor, but the time has changed.” Since the Fillon trial, In particular, whose shadow hangs over the Mercier affair. The accusation criticizes the former senator for having employed his wife from 2005 to 2009 as a parliamentary assistant – he already had two, but it is not prohibited – for fictitious work; He had already hired it ten years earlier, but this fact is prescribed. He also hired his daughter from 2012 to 2014 as a parliamentary attaché, when she lived in London, never set foot in the Senate or kept trace of his work.

“The artistic blur The most total “

Lawyers have produced dozens of certificates to prove that Joëlle Mercier had spent well without counting – “certificates produced on the eve of the hearing, decided the prosecutor, nothing can testify to their veracity, Not to mention the remote control of some of them, with the same elements of language “. He stigmatized “the most total contradictions and artistic vagueness” by Michel Mercier, “who opts for the dodge and the responses against the current”. He stressed that they were very little to know that the wife of the former minister was his parliamentary assistant, and that he had not found “no consistency of his work”.

M me Mercier assures that she represented, in Lyon and in her canton, her husband, from the Kermesses to burials – “in law, the parliamentary assistant assists the parliamentarian but does not represent him “, decided the prosecutor. The point is not so clear, however, and the defense supported the opposite, the Senate being quite elusive on the question.

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/Media reports.