The home of Senator LR du Nord Marc-Philippe Daubresse was searched on Thursday as part of an investigation for embezzlement targeting the elected official, a source close to the investigation told AFP, confirming information from Le Monde .
Marc-Philippe Daubresse, former minister of Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, has been the target since 2019 of an investigation by the National Financial Prosecutor's Office (PNF) relating to the use of his representative allowance for mandate expenses (IRFM) when he was a deputy of the North, between 2012 and 2017.
Investigators from the Economic Crime Repression Brigade (BRDE) of the Paris judicial police also went to the town hall of Lambersart (North) to obtain documents related to the case. The PNF confirmed this information. The senator was mayor of Lambersart for nearly 30 years, from February 1988 to December 2017. The financial prosecutor's office had launched investigations after a report from the High Authority for the Transparency of Public Life (HATVP).
According to the online media Médiacités, which revealed the existence of the investigation in 2020, the HATVP had uncovered nearly 100,000 euros in disputed expenses that could fall under the offense of embezzlement of public funds. In 2018, the HATVP had sent the files of about fifteen elected officials to the courts after having checked the variation in their assets, between the first rules of supervision of the IRFM in 2015 and their end of mandate in 2017.
At the end of the investigations, nine procedures were closed without further action, announced the national financial prosecutor's office in March 2022 without specifying the identity of the parliamentarians concerned. These classifications took place at the end of "the prior compensation for the damage and after justification of the reimbursement to the National Assembly or the Senate of the expenses considered as ineligible for the compensation representative of the expenses of mandate", had specified the prosecution.
The sums reimbursed directly to Parliament "varied between 6,707 euros and 47,299 euros". A first conviction came in January: former LR senator from Meurthe-et-Moselle Philippe Nachbar was sentenced to a three-year ineligibility sentence and a fine of 100,000 euros for the misuse of 98,000 euros of compensation for mandate expenses between 2015 and 2017 during an appearance with prior admission of guilt (CRPC).
