Rachida Dati, one of France's most prominent conservative politicians and a former culture minister, appeared before a Paris criminal court on Wednesday to face charges of corruption and influence peddling connected to her time as a member of the European Parliament. The trial, scheduled to run until 28 September, centres on whether nearly €900,000 she received from a Dutch subsidiary of the Renault-Nissan automotive group between 2009 and 2012 represented genuine legal work or disguised lobbying — an activity strictly prohibited for MEPs.

At the heart of the case is a contract signed in October 2009 between Dati and Carlos Ghosn, the then-chief executive of Renault-Nissan. Under the agreement, Dati — who had just been elected to the European Parliament in June 2009 — was to provide legal advisory services for an annual fee of €300,000, focused on helping the carmaker expand into the Middle East and North Africa. Prosecutors argue the contract was a cover, noting that Dati did not even qualify as a lawyer until four months after it was signed and that investigators found little documentary evidence of any legal work being carried out. Crucially, they point to three parliamentary questions Dati submitted that were favourable to Renault-Nissan's interests, including one on vehicle noise regulations that, according to investigators, was received in Ghosn's secretary's inbox five days before it was formally filed — raising questions about who may have drafted or approved it. The prosecution's indictment describes Dati as having served as a "Trojan horse" for Ghosn inside the European Parliament.

Dati's defence firmly rejects these characterisations. Her lawyers maintain she worked "exclusively" as a legal professional for the company, conducting missions in Morocco, Algeria, Turkey, and Iran, and plan to call six witnesses to establish the reality of that work. They attribute the scarcity of written records to Ghosn's well-known preference for operating without notes or paper trails. Dati herself arrived at court dressed in black, described by her legal team as "determined and combative," and declined to speak to reporters. Ghosn, 72, is being tried in absentia; now living in Lebanon since fleeing Japan in 2019 in a separate financial misconduct case, he requested a postponement of the trial, which the court rejected.

Dati, 60, is a significant figure in French public life. The daughter of Moroccan and Algerian immigrants, she grew up in a low-income housing estate near Chalon-sur-Saône in Burgundy and became the first woman of north African and Muslim heritage to hold a major French government post when she served as justice minister under President Nicolas Sarkozy. She also faces separate, ongoing investigations into alleged undeclared payments from energy group GDF Suez and undeclared luxury items worth €420,000. She denies all wrongdoing across all cases.

For anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International France, which has joined the case as a civil party, the trial raises broader questions about institutional integrity. Its president, Patrick Lefas, argued that the case exposes how professional secrecy rules for lawyers can be weaponised to conceal conflicts of interest in legislative bodies, and called for clearer limits on the outside earnings of MEPs. If convicted, Dati faces up to ten years in prison, a fine of up to €450,000, and a five-year ban from holding public office.