The ex-elected representative of the Union of Democrats and independent had provided his mother-in-law with a fictitious job as a parliamentary assistant between May 2009 and August 2010.
Mo12345lemonde With AFP
The Paris Criminal Court sentenced the former UDI deputy for Seine-Saint-Denis Jean-Christophe Lagarde to ten months suspended prison sentence for having provided his mother-in-law on Wednesday, December 7 for having a fictitious job as a parlor Between May 2009 and August 2010.
The former centrist parliamentarian (between 2002 and 2022), 55 years old and who left the presidency of the Union of Democrats and Independent in October, was guilty of embezzlement of public funds for paying to His wife’s mother, Monique Escolier-Lavail, nearly 40,000 euros in wages within the framework of an “atypical, occult” contract, said the court in her deliberation.
calling for “unbearable facts for the social body”, the prosecution had requested a year of suspended imprisonment and five years of deprivation of civil rights. Six months suspended had been requested against his mother-in-law.
During the hearing in October, the defense of Mr. Lagarde had argued the relaxation by castigating a “lazy investigation” and by recusying any parallel with the affair of the fictitious employment of the former wife -Premier Minister François Fillon, after which family parliamentary jobs were prohibited.
“atypical” recruitment
The former deputy tried to justify the “atypical” recruitment of his mother-in-law, former leader of SMEs, for the purposes of a work which he said they prepares on the difficulties of small bosses in France and which has never appeared.
His mother-in-law, for his part, has struggled to detail the content of her mission at the service of her son-in-law, evoking the “newspaper reading” and some “informal conversations” with traders. Even if she lived in the South West, 600 km from the National Assembly, she assured that she had devoted to this mission “five hours of work per day, seven days a week” but the investigators had not found traces of his work.
According to his story, the computer where his newspaper cuts and observations were recorded was also damaged by lightning that fell on his house in 2017. “We cannot deduce from the absence of Material element the fact that there was no work, “pleaded his lawyer, Me Virginie Tesnière.
The survey had been opened by the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF) in October 2017 after the complaint of an opposition advisor to the City of Drancy (Seine-Saint-Denis) that Mr. Lagarde directed for more of sixteen and of which he is today one of the municipal councilors.