Financial needs
Like most loans, the one Le Pen’s party took out in 2014 began with a need for cash.
At the time, Le Pen’s modern touches were breathing momentum into a far-right movement started decades earlier by her father and known for its anti-Semitic and xenophobic views. Le Pen presented a cleaned-up version of the party’s politics, deftly mixing calls to pull France out of NATO and possibly the European Union with broadsides against immigration and Islam.
But the party, then known as the National Front and now called the National Rally, was having difficulty securing credit from traditional French banks. Le Pen accused the banks of discrimination for refusing to offer a loan.
In search of money from a non-French bank, party officials turned to Jean-Luc Schaffhauser, a member of the European Parliament elected as part of Le Pen’s party bloc.
For years, Schaffhauser wanted to build an alliance between Europe and Russia to act, he said, as a Christian bulwark against Asia and the Middle East. In between working as an international consultant for French oil and aerospace firms, he said, he dreamed of one day running a pro-Russian foundation that would distribute Russian money to organizations in Europe and drive the continent closer to Moscow.
Through what he described as work on a French-Russian development-bank project in 2004 or 2005, Schaffhauser said he met a Russian businessman and member of parliament named Alexander Babakov, who in 2012 became the Kremlin’s special envoy for Russian organizations abroad.
Schaffhauser, looking for a loan for Le Pen, said he reconnected with Babakov through a mutual contact in the Russian Orthodox Church and arranged a meeting in mid-2014.
“It was face-to-face,” Schaffhauser recalled, speaking English in an interview. “He says he has a possibility.”
The “possibility” Babakov proposed, according to Schaffhauser, was a loan from the First Czech-Russian Bank. Through a spokeswoman, Babakov declined to comment for this report.
