Danish lawmaker acquitted of EU funds fraud

A right-wing Danish lawmaker was acquitted on Wednesday of misusing European Union funds value 98,835 kroner (€13,286) and falsifying paperwork.

A Copenhagen court docket 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 so as to obtain EU funding. He maintained his innocence all through his trial.

“This implies lots. The case has forged lengthy shadows over the Danish Folks’s Occasion and me as a politician for seven years and some months,” Messerschmidt mentioned after the decision.

Danish prosecutors haven’t indicated whether or not they would attraction.

Messerschmidt served within the European Parliament on the time of the alleged crimes. He obtained 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 court docket gave Messerschmidt a suspended sentence in August 2021 in the identical case. As a result of the decide earlier on Fb had appreciated 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 Courtroom mentioned 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 celebration 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 have been misused by their members.

However the court docket acquitted Messerschmidt of utilizing a solid 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 celebration was utilizing the lodge similtaneously MELD.

In the course of the trial, a number of prime Danish Folks’s Occasion members and different witnesses contradicted Messerschmidt, who turned the celebration’s chairman earlier this yr.

Inner squabbles led to the collapse of the populist celebration, 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 celebration confronted competitors for nationalist voters from new right-wing events on this yr’s Nov. 1 basic election. It obtained 2.6% of the vote, its worst consequence since its creation in 1995.