The Danish Parliament assesses that no constitutional clause has been violated in the Fonseca case before holding two meetings on Thursday.
The Speaker of the Danish Parliament, Søren Gade (V), has called a meeting of the Committee on Rules of Procedure and the Management of the Danish Parliament, the Presidium, on Thursday regarding the Mike Fonseca case.
The committee meeting starts at 1:30 p.m., and immediately after that meeting the Presidium will meet.
This is evident from a letter that Søren Gade sent to the committee on Wednesday.
It was already known that meetings would be held on the matter, but the date for the meetings had not previously been announced.
Last week, a book revealed that the Moderates and chairman Lars Løkke Rasmussen offered former member and current independent Mike Fonseca, among other things, 370,000 kroner in 2023 in a form of severance agreement to resign from the Folketing and thus resign his mandate.
This prompted eight parties outside the government to send a letter to the leadership of the Folketing, asking for a number of factors in the case to be investigated.
They wanted an explanation from the Moderates and wondered where the party was going to get the money from. They also wanted to investigate whether it is a violation of the law to pay someone to resign their mandate, and whether it is a violation of the spirit of the Constitution.
The Moderates have been given ‘the opportunity to make any written comments on the request’, the letter states. However, the Moderates have not wished to comment.
In relation to whether it is a violation of the Constitution, the assessment from the Administration of the Folketing is that the ‘specific case, as it is reported, does not raise questions in relation to section 56 of the Constitution’.
Section 56 of the Constitution states, among other things, that members of parliament are only bound by their convictions and are not obliged to take into account what their party or voters say.
The Administration of the Danish Parliament has not wanted to give an assessment of whether there may have been a violation of the Criminal Code. This is because a private individual has filed a police report against the Moderate Party chairman, it says.
It has also been investigated whether it would be a violation of rules for the use of group support funds and party support funds if a party used that support to ‘pay for benefits to a member of parliament in continuation of the member’s resignation from his or her mandate’.
In both cases, it would not be in accordance with the rules, the conclusion is.
To assess the rules on party support, the Folketing has obtained contributions from the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Health.
However, it is not known whether the Moderates intended to use, for example, group support funds or party support funds to pay Mike Fonseca. Therefore, this specific case has not been assessed.
The Moderates are not represented among the five members of the Presidium of the Folketing.
But the party has group chairman Henrik Frandsen as a member of the Rules of Procedure Committee and thus has the opportunity to participate in Thursday’s meeting.
Lars Løkke Rasmussen has denied having done anything illegal by offering money to Mike Fonseca.
Mike Fonseca was also offered psychological help and crisis management when he negotiated with the Moderates to withdraw from the Folketing.
The negotiations, which Fonseca secretly recorded, took place because the Moderates had become aware that Mike Fonseca was in a relationship with a then 15-year-old girl and had thus broken the party’s internal code of conduct.
Fonseca ended up rejecting the offer from the Moderates and later became an independent in the Folketing.
ritzau
