She has now been named in an investigation into claims her family embezzled nearly £4bn from the country's infrastructure projects.

Of that prosecutors say $27 billion was misappropriated, and $12 billion was judged to have been embezzled, the most serious financial crime for which she was sentenced to death.

He was arrested on 25 October accused of embezzling a huge sum of money from state coffers and depositing it in secret accounts in the Cayman Islands.

As a federal prosecutor, Hochman sought to convict a defendant caught up in “Operation Big Spender” in the 1990s, a scandal that implicated deputies in embezzling over $1 million seized in drug raids.

She has denied wrongdoing, and party spokesman Laurent Jacobelli said "we are going to prove that there is no system to embezzle money from the EU".