Earlier this month Mediapart revealed how the far-right Front National party had obtained a loan of 9 million euros from the Moscow-based First Czech Russian Bank, in a move that has followed the party’s rapprochement with a number of senior Russian political figures, including Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin and Sergei Naryshkin, speaker of the Russian lower house, the Duma, a figure close to President Vladimir Putin.
According to further information now obtained by Mediapart, the Front National has sought a total of 40 million euros in Russian loans, raising important questions about the involvement of a foreign power in French political life.
“A first instalment has been released from a loan of 40 million,” a senior Front National official, a member of its ‘political bureau’, equivalent to an executive committee, told Mediapart. The instalment of 9 million [euros] has arrived, 31 [million euros] will follow,” detailed the official, whose name is withheld.
The party is riding high in opinion polls ahead of local elections due early next year, and presidential and legislative elections due in 2017. Political figures on the Right and the Left, including French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, are warning of a potential victory for the Front National in 2017 against the backdrop of a widespread current disenchantment with mainstream parties amid a deep economic crisis and a series of corruption scandals.
In a statement released to press agency Agence France-Presse on Wednesday evening, Front National leader Marine le Pen, who last weekend confirmed the party had obtained a loan from the First Czech Russian Bank of 9 million euros, described as “fantasist”and “delirious” the suggestion that her party had negotiated a loan totalling 40 million euros. “There has never been question of a loan of 40 million euros,” said Le Pen, who refused Mediapart’s earlier request for an interview. “We have sought 9 million euros and we have obtained 9 million euros. To say that electoral campaigns demand a financial need of 30 million euros, which are refundable, for all the [local] elections in the cantons and regionals, that’s something else.”
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Meanwhile, Le Pen’s economic strategy advisor and Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Bernard Monot told Mediapart that there had not been a “firm request” for the reported sum, but that “a global financing requirement [was], without doubt, expressed in the discussions with the bank”.
“The potential need is for 45 million up until the presidentials and legislatives [elections],” Monot added. “We’re heading there step by step. We’ll fine-tune that as we go along.”
Jean-Luc Schaffhauser, a far right MEP who was instrumental in obtaining the First Czech Russian Bank loan for the party, has confirmed to Mediapart that he was paid 140,000 euros for his role in securing the deal.
Monot, whose professional career has included a managerial position with the French public financial investment institution La Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations, has said he had sought Schaffhauser’s services as an intermediary with Russian lenders before the latter became MEP earlier this year.
“There’s no first instalment or second instalment,” the Front National’s treasurer Wallerand de Saint-Just told Mediapart. “Simply, I have always said that between now and the legislative [elections] we needed between 35 and 40 million euros.”
However, he said he did not discount the possibility that other discussions had been had on the subject to which he was not a party. “I think Schaffhauser perhaps saw them at other times,” he said.
In an interview published on November 23rd in French daily Le Monde, and in which she confirmed Mediapart’s initial report that her party had obtained a 9 million-euro loan from the Russian bank, Marine Le Pen rejected the suggestion that such a deal could compromise the party’s independence, notably concerning foreign policy. “These insinuations are outrageous,” she said. “We have been on this line [of closeness with Russian positions] for a long time.”
Two Front National officials have told Mediapart that Le Pen, who paid an official visit to Moscow in June 2013 and a private visit in April this year, met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in a confidential visit to the Russian capital in February.
In her June 2013 trip to Russia with party vice-president Louis Aliot, Le Pen met with Sergei Naryshkin, speaker of the Russian lower house, the Duma, close to Putin (with whom he reportedly served in the KGB but which he has never confirmed). She also met with Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin and Alexei Puskov, head of the Duma’s foreign affairs committee. Naryshkin and Rogozin are the object of EU and US asset-freezing and travel bans as part of the sanctions against Russia over the crisis in Ukraine.
After her meeting with Duma speaker Naryshkin, Le Pen held a press conference in which she called for greater ties between France and Russia. “I think we have common strategic interests, I think we also have common values, that we are European countries,” she said. “I have the feeling that the European Union is leading a Cold War against Russia. Russia is presented with a demonized face […] a sort of dictatorship, a country totally closed. That is not, objectively, the reality. I feel more in tune with this model of economic patriotism than with the model of the European Union.”
Following Medipart’s revelations of the 9 million euros obtained by the Front National from the First Czech Russian Bank, Russian daily Kommersant, specialised in business and political news reporting, speculated that it “could not have been had without the approval of the Russian authorities”. Other Russian media have also raised the bank’s ties with the Russian political establishment via its owner Roman Yakubovich Popov, a former financial director of Stroytransgaz, the Russian engineering and construction giant active in the gas and oil industries.
In her November 23rd interview with Le Monde, Le Pen insisted the loan “was not secret”. But in an interview with French news magazine L’Obs on October 23rd, one month after the First Czech Russian Bank loan was agreed, she claimed the party was still waiting for replies to its requests for loans with institutions “in the United States, in Spain and, yes, in Russia”.
“Our party has asked all the French banks for loans, but none agreed,” she said then.
The Front National currently receives 5.5 million euros in public subsidies, a funding that is common to all political parties with elected representatives and which is proportionate to their numbers. In 2012, before the far-right party’s significant electoral victories this year in local and European elections, it received annual subsidies of 1.2 million euros.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.