Nazi stag night in French Alps lands Briton with €1,500 fine

Mark Fournier claimed outfit worn during dinner at ski resort of Val Thorens was hired for him by Tory MP Aidan Burley

French Alps resort of Val Thorens, where Mark Fournier's stag party took place in December 2011. Photograph: Philippe Desmazes/AFP/Getty Images

A Briton who wore a Nazi uniform as fancy dress during a stag night at a ski resort in France has been fined €1,500 by a court in the French Alps.

The court also ordered Mark Fournier to pay an additional €1,000 (£822) in damages and interest to an organisation representing families of those who disappeared from France or were deported to the death camps in the second world war.

Fournier, 33, wore the Nazi uniform and insignia – outlawed in France – at a dinner in the ski resort of Val Thorens during December 2011, shortly before he was due to be married.

He claimed the outfit was hired for him by the Tory MP Aidan Burley, the court in Albertville had heard.

Fournier was charged with "wearing a uniform or insignia of an organisation guilty of crime against humanity" and given the maximum fine possible under French law.

He originally faced more serious charges of denial of war crimes, or crimes against humanity and incitement to racial hatred.

He was shown by France TV wearing an SS cap and making a Nazi salute.

The public prosecutor said Burley, 34, at the time parliamentary private secretary to Britain's transport minister, had not been charged because he could not be held responsible under French law.

Michel Rouband, Fournier's lawyer, told the court during the first hearing on 18 December: "My client's behaviour should not be seen as an ideological statement but was organised by his best man, the MP friend, and took part in the context of a boozy stag night."

Rouband said Prince Harry had worn a Nazi uniform in 2005. "English law does not consider the wearing of a Nazi uniform to be, in itself, a crime. We can see that from the conduct of Prince Harry."," he told French journalists.

However, the lawyer for the French Association of Deported, Detained and Families of the Disappeared, a civil party to the legal action, said: "We cannot qualify this sort of act as a schoolboy joke."

Burley, 34, an Oxford graduate who was being groomed for rapid promotion by David Cameron, was sacked as a ministerial aide after the stag-night scandal broke.