Suspended jail term and fine for French MP in €114,000 expenses fraud

Former Paris MP Jean-Christophe Cambadélis has been sentenced to a suspended prison term and fined for his use of €114,057 in parliamentary expenses for personal purposes. 

Mr Cambadélis - age 73, former first secretary of the Socialist Party, and an MP from 1988 to 1993, and then 1997 to 2017 - has also been banned from running for or taking any political position for five years. 

He was sentenced in Paris on September 4 to an eight-month suspended prison sentence, and fined €60,000 (of which €30,000 was suspended), for using €114,057 of his parliamentary expenses for personal purposes.

The criminal court found the former MP guilty of ‘misappropriation of public funds’, and said that he had “knowingly used funds made available to him as part of the indemnité représentative de frais de mandat (IRM) for purposes contrary to their purpose”.

He had “voluntarily broken the law”, the court said, adding that “these acts…committed by an elected representative of the Republic…undermined the values of republican democracy”. 

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The MP was found guilty of having used his IRM expenses to pay his party dues and his campaign expenses in 2017 - even though this had been expressly banned since March 2015. He was also found to have regularly used money to pay for personal expenses, including rent, energy bills, tax, and even a family trip to Prague.

Mr Cambadélis must also repay the National Assembly just over €27,000.

The sentence is very close to that demanded by the financial prosecutor's office, the Parquet national financier (PNF), which had asked for an eight-month suspended prison sentence and an unsuspended €60,000 fine, as well as five years' ineligibility. The only difference is the suspension of 50% of the fine.

Mr Cambadélis’s lawyer, Jean-Étienne Giamarchi, has suggested to Le Monde newspaper that his client will appeal, as he claims he “did not get a fair trial”.

Fiscal fraud scandals

Mr Cambadélis’s expenses, along with those of 14 other elected representatives from all parties, were investigated at the end of 2018 by the Haute autorité pour la transparence de la vie publique (HATVP).

The HATVP was set up after the Cahuzac affair; a scandal in 2013, when Budget Minister Jérôme Cahuzac (Socialist Party) resigned for tax fraud accusations. He later admitted to having had a secret foreign bank account for 20 years. Mr Cahuzac was then sentenced to three years in prison and five years of ineligibility for any political roles, on December 8, 2016.

The scandal led to new laws in France designed to fight fraud, money laundering and perjury by MPs and politicians.

‘Guilty plea’ process refused

In 2022, Mr Cambadélis had agreed to be tried under a form of a ‘guilty plea’, which aims to avoid a criminal trial. As part of this, he had agreed to a suspended jail term of six months, and one year's ineligibility.

However, at the hearing for these procedures, the court judged that these punishments were not severe enough, and refused to allow the process to continue. This led to the MP being tried at the criminal court, leading to the most recent ruling.