Le Pen spurns deadline, as EU seeks return of €300,000 in misspent money

France's far-right candidate for president, Marine Le Pen, was set to lose €7,000 a month from her European Parliament earnings from Wednesday after defying a demand to repay €298,000 of EU funds an investigation says she misspent.

The presidential candidate had until midnight to repay the money, but said she had no intention of doing so.

The parliament concluded that, in her role as French National Front leader, Le Pen had during the 2011-12 legislature paid party staff with the funds, which EU rules say should be used only to pay EU lawmakers' assistants.

The money the European Parliament wants returned was used to pay the salary of Catherine Griset, a close friend of Le Pen as well as her cabinet director.

LePen claimed she is the victim of a politically motivated vendetta.

“In order to reimburse, I’d have had to have received the funds, but my name isn’t François Fillon,” Le Pen said, referring to a growing scandal surrounding conservative presidential nominee Fillon and his wife Penelope, who is suspected of having been paid nearly €1,000,000 for French parliamentary assistance work and employment at a magazine that she didn’t perform.

"I will not submit to the persecution, a unilateral decision taken by political opponents... without proof and without waiting for a judgement from the court action I have started," she said on Tuesday.

Failure to repay the money will see LePen’s monthly EU parliamentary salary cut in half to around €3,000 from February and she will also lose other allowances. In total around €7,000 will be taken from her EU payment slip every month, an EU official said.

Le Pen is one of the front-runners in the French presidential election to be held in April and May.

Polls suggest that she will make it to the run-off where she is likely to face conservative candidate Francois Fillon or centrist Emmanuel Macron.