Rather than put me off, as a result of their response I doubled down and figured I’d carry on, casting the net even wider because I had a good idea where to catch what I was after.
Twelve:
It was Marine Le Pen's financial links and open investigations which revealed the true scale of Russia's European Union operations.
With an established, complex, international network of the far-right and Russia working together on the manipulation of electorates, through psychometrics and disinformation campaigns, France was thought to be the next domino to fall in their advance on the control of finance and politics. Le Pen was, at the time I started investigating, facing the final round of the French Elections against the subsequently successful and immensely popular centrist Emanuel Macron. Before the election, however, all bets were off and Le Pen, having just stepped down from her role as leader of the far-right Front National in order to broaden her appeal, continued to be openly supported by Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin.
Aside from the things I had already started to expose by inspecting the public registers, Le Pen quickly showed herself to be the weakest link in the clandestine operation’s chain – open investigations and clear financial links to Russia were hanging over her and not hard to drill into. The first thing was Sweden wasn't alone in its strong response to interference in the democratic process. Working with the EU, Facebook – who had already been pressured to employ fact checkers to monitor posts on its network and – took out full page adverts in German newspapers advising people how to spot fake news131. The platform then shut down thirty-thousand fake accounts spreading disinformation ahead of the French election campaigns and also teamed up with Google on an initiative to counter disinformation and alternative media sites spreading fake news in favour of Le Pen132. Ten days ahead of the first round of votes, Facebook released an official blog133 confirming their priority was to remove suspect accounts with high volumes of posting activity and the biggest audiences. They even deployed AI to help speed up this process. “We've made improvements to recognize these inauthentic accounts more easily by identifying patterns of activity — without assessing the content itself,” Shabnam Shaik, a Facebook security team manager, wrote in the update.
It was looking into all this with Sweden in mind I found Le Pen’s Front National was also historically linked to the Nordic country in a different way: via the far-right party I’d studied, the Sweden Democrats. Le Pen’ s party had actually helped fund the SD’s 1998 election brochure.
The right across Europe had all of those long established connections I’d already picked over and had aligned with Russia and the US white supremacy movement, but Britain’s UKIP, under Nigel Farage, appeared to have steered clear of this. In 2014, Farage ruled out an alliance with the Front National but relatively swiftly changed tack, eventually giving public backing to Le Pen. If you look a little more closely at UKIP, however, it was already allied with the Sweden Democrats, having formed an EU parliamentary coalition with them in the same year he declined Le Pen. Along with other groups, the new coalition included one former Front National MEP, Joëlle Bergeron, who resigned from the party after being asked to stand down, having called for voter’s rights for European immigrants. She had been a Front National member for forty-two years134. This whole period turned out to be hugely significant in terms of the more overt shifts in the right-wing parties across Europe.
After Putin publicly declared his vision135 of a functioning “Eurasian Union,” the Kremlin began systematically building bridges with the EU groups and, at the same time, Marine Le Pen outlined her concept of Europe as independent nation states controlled by a tripartite axis made up of Paris, Berlin, and Moscow. It is not hard at all to start to gather the huge mass of evidence which surrounds Putin’s vision and the way in which it capitalised on the more extreme political groups and nationalists. Anton Shekhovtsov, of UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, made a statement in 2014136, saying “there is no doubt that the Kremlin uses the European far right. As things are, Russia cannot compete with the EU in terms of economy, human resources, capital and IT– it's only chance to dominate is if Europe is reduced to separate nation states. While direct financial backing is difficult to prove, there is little doubt that Moscow is holding the purse strings. Ideally, Moscow would like to be funding mainstream politicians, but this is expensive and difficult. It is much easier to focus on MEPs where restrictions are more nebulous. Though I believe Russia has been paying these extreme right parties handsomely for lobbying its interests in Brussels.”
Another expert, Professor Mitchell Orenstein of the Department of Political Science at Northeastern University in Boston, made a prescient call for the EU to be alive to the risks back then too. “I really do not believe Putin's challenge to Europe is being taken seriously enough,” he said. “Brussels must begin looking at how these parties are being funded. Putin’s position regarding the Ukraine is one thing, but when it comes to the rest of Europe, he doesn’t need to resort to land-grab tactics. He can just sit patiently on the sidelines and watch as the far right tries to dismantle the EU once and for all.”
Over time, however, this initially more insidious creeping Russian influence had become increasingly obvious, from around 2013 onwards. It was then Le Pen was invited to Moscow by the State Duma leader and Putin ally Sergei Naryshkin, where she also met with Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin. During the 2017 French election campaign, she visited Moscow again, meeting Putin himself137, who Russian media reported to have said: “We attach a lot of importance to our relations with France, trying to maintain smooth relations with both the acting power and the opposition representatives.”
2013 was the same year Nigel Farage met Russia’s London Ambassador, Alexander Yakovenko138 – who later met UKIP and Leave.EU donor Arron Banks after the UKIP conference in 2015. Banks, as his memoir clearly said, described his contact as being with the KGB’s man in London and they held their lengthy discussion about Brexit over vodka. Even before Banks met Oleg, however, in March of 2014, Nigel Farage named Putin as the world leader he most admired139, praising the way the Russian president handled “the whole Syria thing” as “brilliant.” Notably, it was after the first Farage meeting with Yakovenko that UKIP’s MEPs began to appear with increasing frequency on RT, the Russian state media channel, and Farage went on to be offered his own show after Brexit. Farage was also ‘knighted’ on the channel in March 2017140, though the clip went wrong when the little girl dressed up as the Queen asked why he didn’t like foreigners.
It was against the development of this backdrop that, in January 2016, James Clapper – then the United States Director of National Intelligence – was instructed by the US Congress to conduct a major review into Russian clandestine funding of European parties over the previous ten years141. The ground work by Putin’s Kremlin had been going on for a decade and the review arose amidst Washington’s significant concerns over Moscow’s exploitation of European disunity, which they – rightly – believed was aimed at undermining NATO, blocking missile defence programmes, and reversing economic sanctions which came about after the annexation of Crimea. At the time, one senior government official from the UK told the Telegraph: “It really is a new Cold War out there. Right across the EU, we are seeing alarming evidence of Russian efforts to unpick the fabric of European unity on a whole range of vital strategic issues.” A year later, when Russia’s advance had started to claim overt successes, these British officials were nowhere to be seen and this comment was resigned quietly to history.
Clapper himself resigned ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration in November 2016, by which time Brexit had caused a significant shock across the EU and troop movements had begun escalating on Europe’s Eastern borders. By February 2017, the Baltic states, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria were accommodating soldiers from across the NATO member states142 and more than seven thousand troops had been deployed in the countries bordering Russia. The UK was acting as the l
ead nation in Estonia, the home of original Capstone experiment, where eight hundred soldiers were based at the Tapa, around fifty miles from Tallinn. French and Danish forces were also deployed with them. British soldiers had also been stationed in Poland as part of a US-led NATO mission of about four thousand troops supported by the Romanian army – one of the last acts of Barack Obama. To give some idea of the scale of Russian aggression, the official estimates were that Putin had deployed over three-hundred thousand troops to the EU border, along with a whole host of new military equipment. It has also been rumoured that one of the Russian cruise missile systems had covertly been brought within firing range of major European targets.
France’s strategic role as a leading NATO nation is crucial and they are, in the wake of Brexit, in line to take the role of Deputy Supreme Allied Commander held by Britain since 1951. It is subsequently logical France would fall within Russia’s sights. This makes it all the more alarming that, in 2014, the Front National, while aiming for the presidency under Le Pen, confirmed taking Russian money. The First Czech-Russian Bank, based in Moscow, initially loaned the party nearly nine and a half million Euro (which is over seven million pounds) and a further two million Euro (around one and half million pounds) was borrowed from a company based in Cyprus – the home of Rybolovlev’s Browsefish and a country declared a Russian asset by Kremlin Watch143. At the time, Le Pen responded to the media coverage saying: “What is scandalous here is that the French banks are not lending,” while Russia correspondent Luke Harding, reporting for the Guardian144, wrote: “In Soviet times the KGB used “active measures” to sponsor front organisations in the West including pro-Moscow communist parties. The Kremlin didn’t invent Europe’s far-right parties. But in an analogous way Moscow is now lending them support, political and financial, thereby boosting European neo-fascism.” Harding made similar conclusions to the academics and intelligence experts I had discovered, reporting that: “Tactically, Russia is exploiting the popular dissent against the EU – fuelled by both immigration and austerity. But as right-wing movements grow in influence across the continent, Europe must wake up to their insidious means of funding, or risk seeing its own institutions subverted.”
Only days before I started to look into Le Pen in May 2017, a joint investigation by French journalists at Mediapart, in collaboration with Latvian colleagues at re:Baltica, revealed Vilis Dambiņš, a director of an intermediary company managing assets related to the family of Alexander Babakov, Vladimir Putin’s special representative for relations with Russian organisations abroad, personally met with at least two high-ranking officials of Le Pen’s Front National, to discuss options for the party to get a further Russian loan145. The second loan, reportedly an application for three million Euro, was made to an organisation called Strategy Bank, which allegedly had its licence revoked, and the loan was never completed. The first loan provider, FCRB who issued the nine and a half million Euro loan, also had its licence to trade removed in 2016 due to “poor asset quality” and a failure to “normalise its work.” The bank was fully owned by billionaire Roman Popov, who had, until then, managed to maintain a low profile. However, in July 2016, the Czech central bank filed a legal complaint against the financial management of ERB bank, also owned by Popov. As a result, anti-corruption police launched an investigation into the suspicious syphoning of funds.
First known as the European-Russian Bank, it was set up to fund Czech-Russian trade but, according to insiders146, primarily served as the source of finances for Popov and his influential countrymen. The inquiry was triggered when a portion of the bank’s finances simply disappeared. According to sources: “Money was flowing from the ERB bank through bonds, mostly fictitious ones.” ERB responded to the probe via its website, saying it was in a “good condition” and also in the Czech press, saying it was all part of “the anti-Russian rhetoric that has long been used in the EU countries and partially also in the Czech Republic.” The pattern of response was now quite familiar to me, and it was not restricted to Russian firms alone but also to anyone who is linked to them, whether directly or indirectly. It all formed part of the broader disinformation and confusion narrative.
Le Pen’s finances do not improve on closer inspection. She has also been personally subject to a European Union investigation of her funding which resulted in an adverse finding.
The European Anti-Fraud Office (know as OLAF) is the only EU body mandated to detect, investigate and stop fraud with EU funds. In July 2016, OLAF concluded an investigation concerning the misuse of parliamentary assistance allowances by Marine Le Pen in her official capacity with the Front National. The unit recommended to the European Parliament they recover a rather large sum of almost three-hundred-and-fifty thousand Euro. The specific details of the allegation against Le Pen were that she used funds allotted for parliamentary assistants to pay the salaries of her personal assistant, Catherine Griset, and her bodyguard, Thierry Legier, for work unrelated to her EU role. As a result, and in an effort to recoup the funds, the parliament began withholding half of Le Pen's stipend effective from February 2017 and suspended her expense allowances and half of her housing allowance in March. Le Pen, of course, denied any wrongdoing yet invoked her immunity as an MEP, refusing to attend questioning by the investigating magistrates. She also asked the EU's General Court to suspend the recovery action while awaiting a primary ruling on a legal request to have the investigation findings thrown out. The General Court rejected Le Pen’s case in April 2017147, having already waved away similar requests from three other Front National members.
Numerous other party MEPs were targeted in the same inquiry and also faced salary sanctions. The Parliament is seeking to recover a total of over one million Euro and French investigators, probing a fake jobs scam, raided the party's headquarters outside Paris in March 2017. The French authorities carried out the warrants as they attempted to determine whether the Front National appropriated European Parliament funds to pay for twenty assistants who were presented as parliamentary aides while working for the party in other domestic capacities.
Exploring these broader allegations against the Front National, OLAF provided me with a broadly worded response, telling me: “OLAF is investigating suspicions of fraud and irregularities concerning the use of parliamentary assistance allowances by MEPs belonging to the Front National.”
“The OLAF investigation is examining possible breaches of the Statute of Members of the European Parliament and its implementing measures, potential conflicts of interest and possible misuse of EU finances. However, as the investigation is on-going, OLAF is not in a position to confirm or deny the alleged involvement of any specific persons in this case, nor make any other comments,” their statement said. “This is in order to protect the confidentiality of on-going and possible ensuing investigations, subsequent judicial proceedings, personal data and procedural rights.”
“The OLAF investigation is examining possible breaches of the Statute of Members of the European Parliament and its implementing measures, potential conflicts of interest and possible misuse of EU finances,” their spokesperson wrote.
Having contacted the European Parliament directly, they were incredibly helpful and sent a comprehensive background to the framework and regulation of MEP expenses. The parliament told me: “Members of the European Parliament are entitled to assistance from personal staff whom they may freely choose. The parliamentary assistance allowance may not be used to cover personal expenses or for grants or donations of a political nature. Members may not either directly or indirectly employ members of their immediate family (parents, children, brothers, sisters, spouses or stable non-marital partners). In general, contracts with assistants must not give rise to any conflicts of interest.” They also set out the rules relating to the allocation of financial support and how it can be used: “The maximum monthly amount defrayable in respect of all such personal staff is EUR 24 164 (2017 rate). None of these funds are paid to the MEP themselves. A Member’s staff duties
must specifically relate to the Member’s work as Member of the European Parliament.”
The specific rules under which the Front National were being investigated related to the impermissibility of using EU funds to “finance contracts concluded with an organisation.” The regulations further prohibited funds from being used for “pursuing political objectives, such as a political party, foundation, movement or parliamentary political group.” A list of admissible and non-admissible costs in relation to the assistants has been adopted by the Bureau of the Parliament and clearly mentions as inadmissible expenses: “Any expenses in relation to elections, referenda or any other campaign whether at national or EU-level.” These rules, it transpired, also triggered a 2016 investigation into Farage’s UKIP.
The Alliance for Direct Democracy in Europe, a UKIP-controlled EU Parliamentary group, was asked to return over one-hundred-and-seventy thousand Euro after officials uncovered a breach of the rules arising from the alliance pouring money into the United Kingdom’s 2015 general election and the Brexit referendum. UKIP spent the EU funds on polling and analysis in constituencies where they hoped to win a seat in the 2015 general election, including in South Thanet – a seat contested by Farage. The party also funded polls to gauge the public mood on Brexit, months before official campaigning began. The EU report on the misspending concluded that “these services were not in the interest of the European party, which could neither be involved in the national elections nor in the referendum on a national level. The constituencies selected for many of the polls underline that the polling was conducted in the interest of UKIP. Most of the constituencies can be identified as being essential for reaching a significant representation in the House of Commons from the 2015 general election or for a positive result for the leave campaign.” I had previously established that Russia had interfered in the 2015 general election and foreign powers were involved in cyberattacks during Brexit.
Alternative War: Unabridged Page 19
