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BBC News (13 January 2026)

Paulin Kola

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has told a Paris court she hopes will overturn her conviction for embezzling EU funds that she had "no sense of having committed an offence".

Le Pen, 57, was found guilty last year for hiring assistants who worked on her National Rally party's affairs rather than for the European Parliament (EP) that paid them.

"The EP did not play its role of raising the alarm as it should have," she told judges at the start of an appeal trial against a conviction banning her from running for public office for five years.

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