A right-wing Danish lawmaker was acquitted on Wednesday of misusing European Union funds price 98,835 kroner (€13,286) and falsifying paperwork.
A Copenhagen courtroom discovered Morten Messerschmidt, who heads the once-powerful Danish Folks’s Occasion, not responsible of creating false statements about holding an EU convention in 2015 as a way to obtain EU funding. He maintained his innocence all through his trial.
“This implies so much. The case has forged lengthy shadows over the Danish Folks’s Occasion and me as a politician for seven years and some months,” Messerschmidt stated after the decision.
Danish prosecutors haven't indicated whether or not they would enchantment.
Messerschmidt served within the European Parliament on the time of the alleged crimes. He acquired extra private votes than some other Danish candidate within the 2014 election for the EU legislature and campaigned on a promise to fight alleged EU fraud.
One other Danish courtroom gave Messerschmidt a suspended sentence in August 2021 in the identical case. As a result of the choose earlier on Fb had favored feedback criticising Messerschmidt and the anti-immigration Danish Folks’s Occasion, Messerschmidt was given a retrial on the idea of judicial bias.
In its ruling Wednesday, the Frederiksberg District Court docket stated Messerschmidt, 42, spent EU cash on a convention in northern Denmark along with his Motion for a Europe of Liberties and Democracy (MELD), a pan-European occasion which was dissolved in 2015.
The case began after the European Union’s anti-fraud physique, OLAF, alleged in 2019 that funds granted by the European Parliament to 2 pan-European political teams had been misused by their members.
However the courtroom acquitted Messerschmidt of utilizing a cast doc that he offered as a contract between the Danish Folks’s Occasion and the lodge the place the MELD convention was held. The contract was signed by the Danish Folks’s Occasion’s administrative chief, who presupposed to be representing the lodge as a result of the occasion was utilizing the lodge concurrently MELD.
In the course of the trial, a number of high Danish Folks’s Occasion members and different witnesses contradicted Messerschmidt, who grew to become the occasion’s chairman earlier this yr.
Inside squabbles led to the collapse of the populist occasion, which spearheaded Denmark’s crackdown on immigration 20 years in the past. The Scandinavian nation has a few of Europe’s strictest immigration legal guidelines due to the position of the Danish Folks’s Occasion.
The occasion confronted competitors for nationalist voters from new right-wing events on this yr's Nov. 1 common election. It acquired 2.6% of the vote, its worst end result since its creation in 1995.
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