The Paris Criminal Court sentenced the former Minister of Justice Michel Mercier to three years in prison on Thursday, January 26, suspended for having granted fictitious parliamentary jobs to his wife and one of his daughters between 2005 and 2014.
Former minister of Nicolas Sarkozy between 2010 and 2012, now 75 years old, Michel Mercier was found guilty of embezzlement of public funds. He had paid, as part of his duties as a senator, €50,000 in salary to his wife, Joëlle, between 2005 and 2009, and more than €37,000 to his daughter, Delphine, from 2012 to 2014.
Judging that the facts were “of a certain gravity” and that Michel Mercier had “prevailed his personal interest over the common interest”, the justice also sentenced him to a fine of €50,000, five years of ineligibility and a three-year ban from public office.
His wife and daughter condemned
The former centrist senator was also convicted of negligent embezzlement of public funds for continuing to pay a parliamentary aide who no longer worked for him. He was also tried for illegal taking of interests, but the facts of which he was accused in this respect were declared time-barred by the court.
Convicted of complicity and concealment, his wife Joëlle and his daughter Delphine were sentenced, respectively, to 18 months suspended prison sentence and €40,000 fine for the first and to 12 months suspended sentence and €10,000 fine for the second.
Michel Mercier’s lawyer declined to comment.
Statements “devoid of any credibility”
Denouncing “the contradictions and the most total artistic vagueness” of the politician and accusing him of opting “for dodging and countercurrent responses”, the prosecution had requested four years of imprisonment, including a firm , ten years of ineligibility and a ban on any public office for five years.
During the trial, the former minister had denied any will to do wrong, highlighting his status as a rural elected official and pleading peasant common sense against the “Parisians” of the national financial prosecutor’s office (PNF).
Justifying the employment of his daughter from 2012 to 2014, when she lived in London and never set foot in the Senate, he had thus affirmed that she served as his “cultural adviser”. Delphine Mercier, she said she threw “during a move” all her notes relating to her work. In its deliberation, the court considered that “these statements were devoid of any likelihood”.
Investigation opened after an article in Le Canard enchaîné
The facts judged are spread over a period when family parliamentary jobs were not yet prohibited. They have been since the summer of 2017 following the resounding Fillon affair.
The investigation, opened by the PNF in August 2017 after an article in Le Canard enchaîné, had led the former Keeper of the Seals to give up the seat which was then promised to him on the Constitutional Council.
The former minister and senator remains implicated in another file of fictitious jobs. Since 2019, he has been indicted in the case of MoDem MEP assistants alongside other centrist party executives, including François Bayrou.
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