One year in prison required against the ex-minister for suspicion of fictitious jobs

The former Minister of Justice is on trial for “embezzlement of public funds” and “illegal taking of interests” and risks imprisonment. A four-year prison sentence, including one year in prison, was requested on Wednesday against Michel Mercier, suspected of having granted fictitious parliamentary jobs to his wife and daughter. He had employed his wife Joëlle as a parliamentary assistant while he was a senator between 2005 and 2013, and his daughter Delphine between 2012 and 2014. Sentences of respectively two years suspended sentence and 18 months suspended sentence were requested against these two members of his family.

Wanting to punish “acts that are all the more intolerable in that they have been committed by a man who has been involved in politics for 40 years”, the prosecution also called for a ten-year ineligibility to be pronounced against him, accompanied by a ban on any public function for five years and a fine of 50,000 euros.

Wife and daughter equally tried

Regarding Joëlle Mercier, tried for “concealment” and “complicity”, the prosecution considered that she “could not be unaware that she was committing particularly serious acts” and that her conviction should “take into account the duration of the offense “. She is on trial for facts ranging from 2005 to 2013 but she had started collaborating with her husband in 1995, the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF) considering that the facts are time-barred.

She is also being prosecuted for having organised, at the expense of the General Council of the Rhône, of which her husband was the president, “events” ranging from cooking classes to cultural visits which have benefited several hundred people, the majority of them wives of Rhone notables. . Finally, Delphine Mercier was judged for having occupied between August 2012 and April 2014, a period when she lived in London, a position of parliamentary assistant for which she could not provide proof of her work.

At the helm, Michel Mercier justified during these four days of debates the use of members of his family as parliamentary assistants, a practice prohibited since 2017 but at the time “current”, a fortiori for rural elected officials such as he claims itself. The investigation was opened in August 2017 after an article by the chained duck and had led the 75-year-old former Keeper of the Seals to give up the seat that was then promised to him on the Constitutional Council. “I consider (…) that I will not be able to sit with the necessary serenity”, declared this close friend of François Bayrou.