Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France’s far-right Front National, allegedly held a hidden Swiss bank account via a trust overseen by his butler, containing €2.2m including €1.7m in gold ingots and coins, the investigative website Mediapart has reported.
The website reported on Monday that prosecution authorities in Nanterre, west of Paris, were handed details of the trust and bank account by the French anti-money-laundering authority, Tracfin. If the presence of a hidden bank account is established, Le Pen could face action for failing to make a full disclosure of his estate to financial watchdogs and possibly for tax fraud.
Front National, currently headed by Le Pen’s daughter Marine Le Pen, has railed against what it deems the corruption of the French elite, styling itself as a down-to-earth alternative. It has made a series of election gains in recent years, winning mayors, increasing its local councillors and gaining MPs and senators.
Mediapart claimed that Gérald Gérin, a close assistant to Le Pen who has been described as his butler and who is currently a Front National regional councillor, had in 2008 become the legal beneficiary of a trust based in the British Virgin Islands. This structure had an account at HSBC bank in Switzerland until 2014, the website reported. The HSBC account was closed in 2014 and the funds transferred to the Bahamas to an account with the Swiss bank CBH. The website said Le Pen was the economic beneficiary of the undisclosed trust.
Gérin told Mediapart he was not a beneficiary of the trust and said he would be asking for explanations from Le Pen and lawyers.
Contacted by the Guardian, Le Pen’s office made no comment.
The Front National is facing various funding inquiries. It is at the centre of an inquiry by investigative judges into possible illegal campaign funding in 2011 and during the parliamentary and presidential election of 2012. Separately, the party has been referred to the EU’s anti-corruption agency over allegations that MEPs’ assistants took salaries from the European parliament while working for the party. This month, the Socialist parliamentary group asked for a commission to be set up to investigate Russian loans to the party which it claimed could have come in exchange for political support for Vladimir Putin, president of Russia.
In 2013, the Paris prosecutor’s office opened a preliminary inquiry into Le Pen’s declared wealth after the state watchdog for transparency in public life warned of a possible discrepancy between his wealth accrued between 2004 and 2009 and his earnings as an MEP.
Next week Le Pen, 86, will face a disciplinary hearing of the party’s executive after a family rift in which Marine Le Pen denounced his inflammatory comments belittling the Holocaust and defended Marshal Pétain, the leader of France’s Nazi collaborationist Vichy regime.
