Confidant of France's Le Pen charged over loan

A confidant of French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has been charged with making an illegal loan to her far-right National Front party, judicial sources said Saturday. It is the second fraud case in recent weeks to be filed against someone close to Le Pen, one of the frontrunners in the rollercoaster French presidential campaign.
In this case Frederic Chatillon, who heads a company called Riwal that did communications work for party candidates, is accused of loaning money to FN satellite group Jeanne.
A source close to the case said the loan was illegal because it was made directly from Riwal and companies are forbidden from contributing to political parties in France.
As part of a probe into the party's financing for local and European elections in 2014 and 2015, Chatillon was charged February 15 with misappropriating his company's assets.
News of the case comes days after Le Pen's personal assistant Catherine Griset was charged on Wednesday with breach of trust in the probe into allegations the National Front defrauded the European Parliament of about 340,000 euros ($360,000). Le Pen, who sits in the European Parliament, has furiously denied accusations she broke the rules by using parliamentary funds to pay Griset as well as bodyguard Thierry Legier for jobs in France rather than at the European Parliament.
Le Pen, who has vowed to call a referendum on France's membership of the European Union if elected, has described the investigation as a vendetta. She is not the only presidential candidate facing accusations over "fake jobs". Her conservative rival Francois Fillon is fighting claims he paid his wife more than 700,000 euros for parliamentary work that she might not have carried out.