French Lawmaker Denies He Was Paid to Promote a Crypto Scam in National Assembly

cryptonews.com:

A French lawmaker has been accused of promoting limocoin swap (LMCSWAP), a “suspicious” African crypto project – but denies claims he was paid to talk up the coin in the National Assembly by lobbyists.

The claims were the latest to come from the newspapers Le Monde and MediaPart’s investigations into an Israel-based firm named Team Jorge.

MediaPart and Le Monde explained that the MP, Hubert Julien-Laferrière, last year made “off-topic” remarks about a token named limocoin swap (LMCSWAP) at a meeting of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Assembly.

The media outlets referred to the token as a “cryptocurrency that was launched by the Cameroonian businessman Emile Parfait Simb.” Since 2022, they noted, hundreds of individuals have accused Parfait Simb of orchestrating a Ponzi scheme.

A report from Jeune Afrique in August 2022 explained that the businessman had emptied his bank accounts and fled his native country.

The coin is built on the Binance-run BNB Chain – and the complaints late year drew a response from Binance Africa.

Julien-Laferrière represents the Ecologist-NUPES coalition of parties and was elected to serve as an MP in central Lyon. He began his career as an MP in 2017.

And the investigators claimed they had evidence that the MP was paid to speak about limocoin swap in the French parliament by the lobbyist Jean-Pierre Duthion.

After the allegations were made public, the MP took to Twitter to claim that he was “not being paid by anyone.”

He wrote:

“I strongly deny the assertions that I am ‘at the service’ of Duthion. I refute the idea that I could abuse my status […] in any way…”

Julien-Laferrière claimed that his “cryptocurrencies”-related comments “constituted a manifest error of judgment.”

But he claimed that