As the start of the legislative session approaches, Sophia Chikirou met with the investigating judges, as reported The worldTuesday, September 24. At the end of her hearing, the Paris MP, re-elected in the first round at the end of June, could receive a accused of “aggravated fraud” in the affair of the accounts of La France’s 2017 rebellious campaign.
The court accuses her of having charged, through her company Mediascop, for services with margins much higher than those of other professionals in the sector. However, any billing above the market price is illegal, because services provided in the context of campaigns are subject to reimbursement by the State, sometimes modulated after control by the National Commission of Campaign Accounts and Political Financing. Facts that she firmly denies.
The “rebel” elected official had already been summoned for arraignment in August 2022, but the defense postponed the meeting for scheduling reasons: Mme Chikirou had just been elected deputy for Paris for the first time. Unless she asked for her parliamentary immunity to be lifted, the courts could not force her to attend these meetings.
Billing – at the top of the market price – for the work of volunteers or poorly paid employees has long been used by left-wing parties to finance themselves in the absence of major donors. State reimbursement of these benefits supplemented a slush fund in view of the upcoming election deadline.
Exception
During the 2017 campaign, Mediascop, the second largest service provider of the campaign with a turnover of 1.16 million euros, was an exception among the “rebels” service providers. According to accounting records commissioned by the courts, Sophia Chikirou paid herself, in addition to her remuneration as director of Mediascop, almost all of the profits from this campaign in bonuses and dividends, i.e. 64,000 euros in gross dividends on the 76,000 euros of profits generated by her company in 2016 and 65,000 euros for the year 2017.
Can this exception be explained by Sophia Chikirou’s multiple roles during this campaign? The “rebel” was both the director of the service provider Mediascop, but also the campaign’s communications director – and therefore a client of its company – and very close to the leader of the “rebels”, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Their on-again, off-again relationship, known to party leaders since 2011, was ignored by the general public until 16 October 2018, when investigators who went to search Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s house at dawn found her there.
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