Sacré bloomers!
Macron MP resigns after putting €8,400 of lingerie and clothes on expenses account
IT’S an expenses scandal with a little va-va-voom.
Where a politician in Britain once claimed for something as nondescript as a floating duck house, a rising star in France’s ruling party has been brought down by lingerie.
Coralie Dubost, an MP for Emmanuel Macron’s La République en Marche (LREM), has been forced to quit after buying more than €8,000 worth of clothes and lingerie on expenses.
Ms Dubost, 39, was also accused of ‘mismanaging’ aides by asking them to spy on her domestic staff and take care of chores including her dry cleaning and shoe repairs.
A review of her expenses found Ms Dubost, deputy parliamentary chief of LREM, spent €8,400 on clothes in three months in autumn 2018 – including €500 on underwear from French brands including Princesse Tam Tam and Darjeeling.
Ms Dubost, who has been an MP for Montpellier in the south of France since 2017, also spent parliamentary funds on hotels, meals and outings that had little apparent bearing on her duties, the report said.
A lawyer by profession, she was one of the recruits from outside politics who joined LREM after Mr Macron founded the party in 2016.
Her departure is an embarrassment for the president only six weeks before a parliamentary election in which he will seek to renew his party’s majority in the National Assembly.
Ms Dubost denies wrongdoing and claims she is the victim of a ‘cabal’. But she resigned after details of her expenses spending were leaked to the Mediapart independent news website.
The findings of an audit for the National Assembly’s ethics watchdog were delivered last year but had been kept secret.
After the leak, Ms Dubost said: ‘The time has come for me to withdraw from political life and devote myself to my family. I will not be a candidate for re-election... I have been targeted by unfair attacks, which do a disservice to my political group, to electoral deadlines and to democracy.’
Ms Dubost said she had repaid her spending on lingerie and other items and had been misled by staff on what she was allowed to charge to her €5,350 monthly fixed allowance for expenses.
She claimed: ‘I am not a cheat. There are parliamentary outfits and personal outfits. I do not wear the same clothes in my personal and MP’s life.’
Mr Macron tightened the rules over allowances in 2017, requiring MPs, who earn a salary of €86,000 to file expenses receipts.
A parliamentary expenses scandal in Britain, which emerged in 2009, exposed MPs’ scandalous claims for luxuries including moat cleaning, swimming pool servicing – and Peter Viggers’s €2,000 duck house.
‘I’ve been targeted by unfair attacks’