A key aide to François Fillon was employed at a billionaire's charitable foundation while also working for the right-wing presidential candidate, Mediapart can reveal. Alexia Demirdjian, who has been a major figure in Fillon's digital strategy since the spring of 2015, was hired as a project manager by the Fondation Culture et Diversité in March of the very same year. But Alexia Demirdjian left no public trace of her work at the foundation, an organisation which helps young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to get access to art and culture, and which is part of the Fimalac group run by billionaire Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière. He is the man who paid Fillon's wife Penelope €100,000 to work on his magazine Revue des Deux Mondes, for which she appears to have done little work.
According to Mediapart's investigation Alexia Demirdjian never featured on the foundation's public organisation structure or organogram. And when Mediapart questioned foundation employees about Demirdjian's work, they declined to talk about her role there. On the other hand there is plenty of online evidence of the work that she carried in François Fillon's team during the same period. Inevitably the revelations about the parallel jobs will raise questions about the legitimacy and reality of Alexia Demirdjian's work at the foundation, following the allegations of “fake work” surrounding François Fillon and his wife Penelope.
The couple are facing questions both over the payments she received for her work at Lacharrière's magazine and the €500,000 or more of public money she received as a parliamentary assistant to her husband for eight years, amid doubts about how much work she carried out for him. On Tuesday January 31st the publication that broke the original story, Le Canard Enchaîné, claimed that the total amount of money that Penelope Fillon earned was in fact closer to €900,000, with two of the couple's children receiving a further €84,000 in total as parliamentary aides to their father.
The financial crime branch of the public prosecutor’s office has opened a preliminary investigation into suspected “misappropriation of public funds” and “receiving” the proceeds in relation to the parliamentary assistant allegations. It is also investigating “misuse of company assets” and “receiving” the proceeds with regard to the payments made to Penelope Fillon by the Revue des Deux Mondes. The couple were questioned separately by detectives on Monday January 30th. Both deny any wrongdoing. Alexia Demirdjian declined to speak to Mediapart.
Alexia Demirdjian, who is is a graduate of the Bordeaux and Paris sites of the prestigious Sciences-Po university and who worked for the French Finance Ministry in its debt mediation service and also as a parliamentary aide, is seen as an important figure in François Fillon's campaign team. In 2016 the consultancy firm Comfluence, which reported on the key staff in the communications teams of the contenders for the Right's presidential primary election, outlined the central role occupied by this “permanent advisor to François Fillon” who it said was “in charge of communication tools”.
In a media report on the Institut de Formation Politique (IFP), which is seen by some as a breeding ground for “liberal conservatives” and political militants with Catholic leanings, and where Alexia Demirdjian also studied, she was even labelled as the “cornerstone” of Fillon's digital team. On social media she describes herself as having been in charge of digital communication for the Fillon 2017 project since March 2015. That is the time at which she was also hired by Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière's foundation.
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Numerous Tweets written by Alexia Demirdjian since 2015 show evidence of her involvement in Fillon's campaign. However, in contrast there are no social media references to her project mission at the Fondation Culture et Diversité from March 2015 to the spring of 2016.
Inside the foundation itself employees appear embarrassed by the subject. Several staff members, contacted by Mediapart on numerous occasions, refused to comment, even anonymously, or declined to call back. “Ah....” was the eventual reply of one employee contacted on Sunday January 29th, momentarily confused at the mention of Alexia Demirdjian's name, before they put the phone down.
Another employee, who was informed in advance about the nature of Mediapart's call, and who was contacted on Monday, spoke reluctantly, saying that Alexia Demirdjian had “indeed worked with us internally on several strategic points”. When asked to elaborate on which strategic points and whether the work was consistent with her functions as a member of Fillon's team that employee, too, hung up and switched off their phone. Demirdjian's Linkedin profile was also updated by Monday morning.
“She was our part-time employee on a global project concerning a platform providing information and careers advice for young people in relation to studying and working in culture … everyone who knows the foundation had met her,” said Éléonore de Lacharrière, daughter of Marc de Lacharrière and managing director of the foundation, who shrugged off the involvement of her employee in Fillon's campaign as a private matter “which didn't pose a problem”.
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However, unlike the ten or so other project leaders and managers in the foundation, Alexia Demirdjian did not feature in the organisation's organogram. “She was not there at the time we decided to display the project leaders on the site as they are today,” suggested Éléonore de Lacharrière. When it was pointed out that Alexia Demirdjian was there at that time, Éléonore de Lacharrière said it was “because she was not linked with the 'Equality of Opportunities' programmes” but instead worked on internal issues.
In fact, Demirdjian's task was apparently to draw up a qualitative appreciation of the 'Equality of Opportunities' programmes and write internal memos with the aim of creating an online careers advice tool that should soon be finished. Éléonore de Lacharrière said the public obviously does not have access to such documentation.
The problem with this claim is that a member of the foundation's management committee, contacted by Mediapart, said they never received any of these memos. And unlike other project leaders at the foundation, Fillon's advisor does not appear on the list of recipients of the management committee minutes. Éléonore de Lacharrière said that only full-time employees received the minutes. Nonetheless, the special treatment afforded Alexia Demirdjian does little to dispel doubts over the precise role of the “project manager” at the foundation, given her dual role with the Fillon team, and given the other allegations that have been made concerning payments to Penelope Fillon.
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- The French version of the article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter