Five days after Mediapart published revelations over the role of one of Vladimir Putin's loyal lieutenants in helping France's far-right Rassemblement National (RN) to obtain a nine million euro Russian loan, the party announced that it had repaid the debt some “60 months” ahead of schedule.
This was possible thanks to cost-saving, streamlining the organisation, renegotiating its contracts and “an increase in the annual state grant” after good results at last year's legislative elections, its treasurer Kévin Pfeffer said in a statement on September 19th. He said that the party intended to continue this “rigorous management” so that it could “repay all its debts between now and the next presidential election in 2027”.
By making this announcement, which was widely picked up in the media, the far-right party is hoping to achieve two things. On the one hand it is saying goodbye to a loan that has been a genuine political millstone since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. And on the other the party wants to comes across as a body that manages its affairs well, even though its debts have risen massively in recent years (to 22 million euros).
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This public relations exercise conceals a number of facts. First of all, it has largely been the influx of public money that has enabled the party to repay this 9.4 million euro loan, which was taken out in 2014 with the First Czech Russian Bank (FCRB). With the election of 89 Members of Parliament at last year's Parliamentary elections, Rassemblement National doubled the public grants it receives from the state, which have gone from five million euros to 10.2 million a year. According to Le Monde some 60% of the first payment of the additional public money was used for the loan repayment.
And far from this being an early repayment, the debt was originally due to be repaid by September 23rd 2019, according to a copy of the loan agreement obtained by Mediapart. The far-right party did not repay the debt by this date and the creditor took legal action in Russia. An out-of-court settlement was then reached which rescheduled the final repayment for the end of 2028 and under which the creditor agreed to waive the financial penalties due for late payment.
Crucially, the repayment of this money now gives the RN the chance to bury the many questions that still linger over a loan that was obtained in the greatest secrecy and remains shrouded in mystery.
In April 2022, during a television debate between the two rounds of the presidential election, Marine Le Pen was backed into a corner on the issue by her opponent Emmanuel Macron. She sought to brush the matter aside, declaring: “Everyone knows, it's public knowledge.” Yet without Mediapart's revelations the general public would have known nothing about the party's Russian millions. For at the end of October 2014, at a time when the loan deal had been already been signed some six weeks previously, Marine Le Pen and her treasurer assured Mediapart and the weekly news magazine L'Obs that while they had approached several banks in France and abroad they had not yet found a lender.
Since Mediapart's revelations Marine Le Pen has kept repeating that it was the lack of French banks willing to lend that forced her to seek a loan abroad. However, this was not the only Russian loan linked to the far-right party, which at the time was still known as the Front National (FN). The same year a micro political party run by FN founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, which helped fund the main party, itself took out a Russian loan for two million euros. Then in June 2016 Marine Le Pen signed an agreement for a further Russian loan for three million euros, though this never materialised as the bank in question, Moscow-based Strategy Bank, ran into problems.
Strategy Bank had on various occasions faced claims of money laundering, and its licence was revoked just one month after the loan deal with the French far-right party was signed. The bank that was lined up to replace it, the NCB Bank, also lost its licence for repeated breaches of Russia's “federal law against money laundering and funding of terrorism”, before being declared bankrupt.
The party was saved in the end thanks to another obscure loan: this was for eight million euros and came from a French businessman linked to the Russian authorities via mysterious agreements. The origin of this money has never been determined.
The far-right party never spoke about the profile of these Russian banks nor about the origins of its mystery loan, and simply repeated that everything was “legal” and that no oversight body had found any issues with the arrangement. “Why would I ask myself questions [about this]? These are funds whose provenance has been verified by [editor's note, French bank] Société Générale …. [which were] overseen by our external auditor, by [the French government agency to track money laundering] Tracfin, by the CNCCFP [editor's note, political funding supervisory body the Commission Nationale des Comptes de Campagne et des Financements Politiques],” Marine Le Pen said in May this year, when giving evidence before the Parliamentary committee of inquiry into foreign interference in French public life.
“At each stage our bank and the CNCCFP approved the agreement and oversaw the reimbursement of this loan,” said Kévin Pfeffer in his statement. However, in 2016 France's financial crimes prosecution unit, the Parquet National Financier (PNF), opened a preliminary investigation into the commissions paid to the intermediary Jean-Luc Schaffhauser, a member of the European Parliament. The following year Société Générale, the bank that the party and MEP Jean-Luc Schaffhauser had always used in France, decided to close all their accounts.
The issue of foreign interference
Even now it has been repaid, the original nine million euro loan still raises a crucial question: did a foreign power try to interfere in French elections? Was there a quid pro quo for this and other loans?
Marine Le Pen has always denied any interference by the Kremlin and the presence of any political “quid pro quo” of any kind. “I signed for a loan with a bank, I didn't sign up for a loan with Vladimir Putin … It commits me to absolute nothing. If it were committing me to something I wouldn't have signed it,” she told the Parliamentary inquiry.
However, several elements do support the theory that some form of political trade-off quo existed. These include text messages from a senior official at the Kremlin, where the issue of Marine Le Pen's stance on the Russian annexation of the Crimea was raised, as was the question of funding and the way in which she would have to be “thanked”. There is also the influence of Russian intermediaries on declarations made by MEP Jean-Luc Schaffhauser to the European Parliament about Ukraine; the trips to the Russian-occupied Donbass region of eastern Ukraine made by Schaffhauser with Marine Le Pen's chief of staff; and the revelation that Marine Le Pen made a request for help to Alexander Babakov, a Russian politician and a significant figure in Kremlin circles.
Indeed, documents made public by Ukrainian hackers and analysed by Mediapart show the close links between the Russian government and what was then called the Front National between 2014 and 2016. They also show the central role played by Putin advisor Babakov in this rapprochement, at a time when Marine Le Pen was looking for finance in Russia to fund her election campaigns.
Babakov was appointed by Putin in 2012 as his special representative in charge of cooperation with Russian organisations abroad - he is now deputy chair of the State Duma - and it was he who opened Russia's doors to the president of the Front National. This was by arranging high-level meetings in Moscow, providing help to get visas, and through the payment of some air fares by the Russians.
At the end of August this year Ukrainian hackers from Cyber Resistance – a member of the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance which is reportedly close to the Ukrainian intelligence services – announced they had hacked the mailbox of Babakov's office, obtaining some 21,677 files covering the period 2008 to 2023.
These 'Babakov Leaks' have been met with no reaction or denial from the man himself; when questioned about the emails by the Russian investigative media Agentstvo, Alexander Babakov declined to comment. There was also no response to multiple attempts made by Mediapart to contact him and his staff.
These emails feature a section of the Front National leadership from that period and the key figures in the party's search for funding: Marine Le Pen, her chief of staff Nicolas Lesage, her vice-president at the time Louis Aliot, treasurer Wallerand de Saint-Just, the MEPs Aymeric Chauprade and Jean-Luc Schaffhauser – who acted as intermediaries in the two Le Pen Russian loans – and commercial lawyer Didier Bollecker, who was tasked by Schaffhauser to oversee the loan deal.
Approached by Mediapart, none of them disputed the authenticity of the emails. Jean-Luc Schaffhauser said he had “nothing to say” about “confidential emails that should not be in your possession”. Wallerand de Saint-Just told Mediapart he had “never met Mr Babakov”, that he had not had “any knowledge of his role with the FN” and had only had contact “with the bank”. The others did not respond.
Over the years the Le Pens have shown little transparency over the Russian loans. They have said not a word about the circumstances in which they were obtained, the interest rates, the repayment schedules, the identity of the intermediaries or the commissions paid. When Mediapart questioned Jean-Marie Le Pen about the provenance of his two million euro loan, he avoided the issue. “I have a contract, the financial channels through which it passes don't really bother me, I don't look any further.” His daughter, Marine Le Pen, has meanwhile always declined to make public her party's loan contract.
At the time of the initial loan revelations the socialist MP Razzy Hammadi raised it as an issue. “The circumstances of these loans, as well as the exclusively Russian origin of the funds, pose a major question which Parliament should look at,” he said, calling for the opening of a Parliamentary committee of inquiry and the publication of the contracts for these “unprecedented loans”.
A judicial investigation into commissions
In his statement of September 19th Rassemblement National's treasurer did not expand, either, on the extraordinary repurchases of the main Russian loan, which he insisted occurred “totally independent of the party's wishes”.
In 2016, just before FCRB bank went bust, the nine million euro debt was bought by an obscure Moscow car hire company, without the money ever entering its tills. Instead the loan ended up in the hands of Aviazapchast, an aeronautical firm run by former military personnel with close ties to the Russian army's secret services.
In its search for funding in Russia, the Front National had on each occasion dealt with small banks of dubious status, or even linked outright to the Russian mafia, which all went bankrupt in mysterious circumstances. The FCRB itself is at the centre of legal proceedings for the alleged misappropriation of funds on a vast level. In 2018 its director Roman Popov, who signed off on the loan to the far-right French party, was charged with embezzling funds and made the object of an international arrest warrant.
During the RN's party conference in November 2022 treasurer Kévin Pfeffer announced that the repayment of the Russian loan would henceforth be a priority as it had become such a “political attack line”.
At the same time Rassemblement National sought to whitewash suspicions of any collusion with Russia by itself prompting the opening of a Parliamentary committee of inquiry into foreign interference in French public life. But this move led to ten years of collusion between Russia and the far-right party being exposed in public. The committee's report, written by Constance Le Grip from the ruling Renaissance party and revealed by Mediapart, concluded that there was “complete alignment” between Marine Le Pen's party and the words and interests of the Russian regime.
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English version by Michael Streeter