Bruno Le Roux, former socialist minister, will be tried in November for embezzlement of public funds, in connection with the illegal employment of his daughters.

Former Socialist minister Bruno Le Roux will be tried on November 12 and 13 by the Paris Criminal Court for embezzlement of public funds in connection with the employment of his daughters as collaborators when he was a member of parliament, we learned on Tuesday, August 5, from a judicial source. A first hearing on the organization of the trial is scheduled for September 3.

In 2017, the National Financial Prosecutor's Office opened an investigation into suspicions of misappropriation of his mandate expenses allowance (IRFM) and the employment of his two daughters as parliamentary assistants between 2009 and 2017 when he was a member of parliament for Seine-Saint-Denis. Shortly after the opening of this investigation, Mr. Le Roux resigned from his post as Minister of the Interior on March 21, 2017.

"We have never made any statements" on this affair for more than eight years , reacted Mr. Le Roux, contacted by Agence France-Presse, explaining that he had reserved his explanations "for investigators only . " "We will continue, in a very calm and determined manner, to reserve for the justice system all the elements that will allow us to demonstrate the total absence of offenses," he also affirmed.

The facts were revealed by the program "Quotidien", on TMC, according to which Mr. Le Roux's two daughters accumulated respectively fourteen and ten fixed-term contracts during this period when they were high school students and then students, for a total amount of 55,000 euros. Some of these contracts may have taken place at the same time as internships in companies or during university time, in the summer of 2013 for one of the daughters, twenty days in May 2015 for the other.

Several parliamentarians have been convicted in recent years for the improper use of their IRFM, including former deputies Jean-Christophe Cambadélis (Socialist Party, PS), Alain Marsaud (Les Républicains, LR), Anne-Christine Lang (PS) and former senator Philippe Nachbar (LR).