French presidential candidate Francois Fillon earned 50,000 euros (US$53,972) to arrange for a Lebanese billionaire to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Total SA chief executive officer Patrick Pouyanne in 2015, The Canard Enchaine newspaper reported.
Lebanese businessman Fouad Makhzoumi met with Putin and Pouyanne at an annual economic conference in St Petersburg, Russia, in June 2015.
Fillon’s advisory firm 2F was paid by Makhzoumi’s Dubai-based company, Future Pipe Industries Group Ltd, for the 63-year-old former French prime minister’s work as an intermediary, the newspaper said, citing details of the contract.
Fillon’s spokeswoman did not reply to calls seeking comment. Calls to Makhzoumi’s offices in Dubai and Abu Dhabi were not answered.
Staff at the company’s Paris office were not able to comment.
A Total spokesman in a text message said that it is possible that Pouyanne met with Makhzoumi at the St Petersburg forum, where he usually meets dozens of people.
While photographs published by state-owned Russian news agency RIA Novosti show Putin and Fillon meeting with Makhzoumi, Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, denied that Fillon had played any role in organizing the meetings.
“Another fake,” he said in a text message.
Fillon’s presidential campaign has been battered by the Canard’s reports into his financial affairs nearly every week since January.
Earlier this month he was charged with embezzlement over one of the initial reports that he gave his wife a fictitious job as a parliamentary aide.
According to the contract, Fillon would help the Lebanese businessman to access influential figures and policymakers in Russia, Algeria, Gabon, and Ivory Coast as well as at French companies, the weekly newspaper reported.
Fillon clinched the Republicans’ nomination in November last year, promising a major departure from French President Francois Hollande’s handling of Russia.
While Hollande has backed European efforts to limit Russian meddling in Ukraine and Syria, Fillon wants to revive France’s relationship with Moscow and ease its reliance on the US, a throwback to the Cold War policy of then-French president Charles de Gaulle.
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