PARIS - French President Emmanuel Macron said he hasn’t been notified about the campaign finance investigation confirmed by prosecutors on Thursday and that he might not be at the heart of the probe.

In response to a question as to whether his party was the target of the probe, Mr Macron said “I don’t know, I only saw the communique. No one wrote to me, no one called me.” 

He added that was normal that judicial authorities run their investigation freely and that it would shed light on the matter. Mr Macron made the comments while on an unrelated trip in Dijon, France.

A criminal probe into McKinsey & Co that initially focused solely on taxes has been widened to examine possible unlawful funding of the 2017 and 2022 presidential campaigns, French prosecutors said in a statement yesterday, based in part on complaints from elected officials.

Mr Macron added that his campaign accounts from 2017 had been reviewed and validated by the procedures under French law and that the 2022 accounts were currently in that process, along with those of all other candidates.

Mr Macron has been ensnared in the McKinsey controversy since the French Senate released a report over the use of private consultants by his government in March.

Consulting companies had wide-ranging influence over government decisions, the report said, prompting accusations that Mr Macron had wasted taxpayer money and served his own interests in the process.

McKinsey has previously said it adheres to French tax and social security rules and is surprised by the focus on the company since it earned just 1 per cent of all spending on consultancies by the country’s administrations. BLOOMBERG