The French culture minister, Rachida Dati, is to go on trial over alleged corruption and abuse of power while she was a member of the European parliament, a judicial source has said.
Dati, 59, who had hoped to run for Paris mayor in next spring’s municipal elections, was charged in 2019 on suspicions she lobbied for the Renault-Nissan carmaking group while an MEP. She has denied the allegations and has repeatedly sought without success to have the charges quashed.
Dati is accused of accepting €900,000 in lawyer’s fees between 2010 and 2012 from a Netherlands-based subsidiary of Renault-Nissan, but of not really working for it. She was an MEP from 2009 to 2019.
Investigations have tried to determine whether she was in fact lobbying in the European parliament for the carmaker, an activity that is forbidden.
Dati, a former minister for the rightwing French president Nicolas Sarkozy, was appointed as culture minister last year in a surprise return to government during Emmanuel Macron’s second term in office.
She also serves as the mayor of Paris’s 7th arrondissement, where she has been a vocal critic of the city’s Socialist mayor, Anne Hidalgo.
Dati became the first Muslim woman to hold a major government post in 2007 when she was appointed justice minister.
She has said that growing up on a low-income estate on the outskirts of the town of Chalons-sur-Saône, in Burgundy, gave her a greater understanding than most politicians of the French electorate. In 2007, Sarkozy said appointing Dati sent a message “to all the children of France that with merit and effort everything becomes possible”.
When Dati was appointed to government last year she had already been charged in the Renault-Nissan case. She denied any wrongdoing.
The Socialist party leader, Olivier Faure, said at the time of Dati’s appointment that the legal investigation was a problem, saying it sent “a bad signal” and went against Macron’s promises of an “exemplary” republic.
Investigating magistrates in France have also ordered that Carlos Ghosn, the former tycoon of Renault-Nissan, be tried in the case, a judicial source told Agence France-Presse. Ghosn, who has been living in Lebanon for years after escaping arrest in Japan, has also denied the charges against him.
A hearing on 29 September will decide on the date of the trial.
A source following the case told AFP that the trial could be held after the Paris municipal elections, due in March
Ghosn, the former chair and chief executive of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance, was arrested in Japan in November 2018 on suspicion of financial misconduct, before being sacked by Nissan’s board in a unanimous decision.
He jumped bail late the following year and made a dramatic escape from Japan hidden in an audio-equipment box, landing in Beirut, where he remains as an international fugitive.
Both Japan and France have sought his arrest.
