Revelations that Marine Le Pen tried to borrow a further €3 million from Russia pose questions on Kremlin interference in the French vote. Mediapart, a French investigative website, revealed on Friday (31 March) that Le Pen, the French anti-EU and far-right candidate, agreed to borrow the funds in order to finance her campaign.
The website published an internal document of her National Front party, showing that she and party chiefs on 15 June last year decided to borrow €3 million from Strategy Bank in Russia at a rate of 6 percent per year.
It said the “purpose of the borrowed money” was “financing the electoral campaign”.
Mediapart also published a second National Front document, which said the funds were to be used for election “expenses” and were to be wired to a bank account opened in Le Pen’s name. Le Pen, whose surprise meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Moscow last week caused a stir, declined to comment.
The party’s treasurer, Wallerand de Saint-Just, who told press last week that he was not asking Russia for more money, told Mediapart that the €3 million loan was “just a project, which did not have any follow-up”. Mediapart did not say whether the National Front received the money and did not give information about Strategy Bank.
The revelations come after Le Pen and her father admitted last year to having previously borrowed €11 million from a different Russian bank. Fears of Russian election-meddling in Europe were heightened after Moscow was accused of having swayed the outcome of the US vote via hacking and media disinformation.
Le Pen is neck-and-neck in polls with the centrist, pro-EU candidate Emmanuel Macron for the first round of the presidential vote on 23 April. He has been targeted by Russian hackers and accused of being secretly gay, an agent of US banks, and of being an agent of Saudi Arabia in French-language Russian media.
Speaking to EUobserver in an interview on Thursday, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a Russian former oil chief who was jailed after trying to enter politics, said Putin saw Le Pen as a “realistic chance to destroy the EU”.
Even if the EU could politically survive France leaving the bloc, as Le Pen wants it to, Khodorkovsky added that a French EU exit would, for Putin, also mean that “the EU would have no more nuclear weapons”. France and the UK, the latter of which started EU exit talks this week, are the only nuclear-armed EU countries
