BB.lv: Kremlin lobbyists in France

“From the Kremlin to the FSB, the secret history of the Franco-Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry”: the French publication Challenges published an investigation into the dubious connections of the association “Franco-Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry” with representatives of the Kremlin and Russian security forces. The French leadership of the organization “without hesitation” sided with Moscow, Challenges claims.

The Franco-Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCIFR) was created in Moscow in 1997. Almost 30 years later, in the midst of a full-scale war that Russia launched against Ukraine, the organization continues to be active in the Russian Federation, and since 2014 has actively opposed sanctions against Moscow.

“The mission of Groupe CCI France-Russie is to strengthen economic and trade ties between France and Russia, to promote cross-investment, constructive dialogue and a better understanding of French and Russian reality,” says the chamber’s website.

CCIFR includes more than 300 Russian and French companies, including Auchan, Renault and Total, whose CEO Patrick Pouyanné co-chaired the CCIFR economic council with Russian oligarch Gennady Timchenko until April 2022. According to Challenges, the French concern Alstom left CCIFR in 2014, speaking out against its financial opacity.

One of the co-founders of the Franco-Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry in 1997 was Emmanuel Quidet, a Frenchman who came to Russia in the early 1990s.

Since 2007, Kide has headed the CCIFR. In 2017, after 20 years of work of the Franco-Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Russia, Emmanuel Quidet explained his work to the TASS agency:

The main thing is that we represent business, and not the French or Russian state.

Another important function is lobbying, without any admixture of negative meaning. When we started talking a long time ago about improving the investment climate in Russia, we actively communicated with both the Russian administration and the French government, and we managed to achieve an improvement. Then, from a purely French association, we became the Franco-Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCI), in order to more actively involve Russian companies in cooperation with the French, and established closer relations with Russian partners.

“Together with the oligarch and friend of Vladimir Putin Gennady Timchenko, he turned the organization into a tool whose effectiveness is valued by French and Russian businessmen,” noted Le Monde in September 2022. It was then, at the end of September 2022, six months after the invasion of Ukraine, that Emmanuel Quidé received Russian citizenship.

For a long time, Kide headed the Moscow branch of the consulting company Ernst & Young (after the start of the war, the Moscow office began to function as an independent organization called “B1”). On April 21, 2022, Emmanuel Quidet was elected to the Board of Directors of Novatek, the largest private natural gas producer in Russia, co-owned by Gennady Timchenko. A year before the war, Kide was appointed chairman of the Audit Committee at the Skolkovo Foundation.

As the Express wrote, receiving a Russian passport and participating in the Board of Directors of Novatek was “too much for official Paris, which demanded his resignation” from the post of president of CCIFR. However, the resignation turned out to be symbolic. An unnamed Express interlocutor claimed that at the economic forum in St. Petersburg in June 2023, “Emmanuel Quidet was omnipresent.”

The French Foreign Ministry tried to achieve the closure of the Franco-Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry

“In 2014, we were shocked by the way the CCIFR behaved when it publicly condemned France’s sanctions policy towards Russia,” Challenges quotes an unnamed French diplomat as saying. According to the publication’s interlocutor, it was “a stab in the back,” and since the full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, “it has turned into a farce.” “February 25, the day when, after the invasion of Ukraine, a second series of much tougher sanctions was adopted [против Москвы]an extremely angry Emmanuel Quidet entered the office of the French Ambassador in Moscow Pierre Levy. <…> As in 2014, he called on France to retreat,” writes Challenges.

The publication calls Mr. Kidet’s receipt of Russian citizenship in September 2022 a “point of no return” in relations between the French Foreign Ministry and the Franco-Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. At this point, according to Challenges, Pierre Levy and the French foreign policy department decided to “simply close the CCIFR” in Moscow. However, this turned out to be not so simple, since the organization actually has a private status. Diplomats faced a refusal from CCI France International, an association that controls a network of trade and industrial missions abroad.

The only thing that French diplomacy managed to achieve in this fight was the resignation of Emmanuel Quidet from the post of chairman of the CCIFR. He gave up his place to Gilles Chenesso, a businessman who has lived in Moscow since 1984 and ran the French travel agency Tsar Voyage here. At the same time, as Challenges notes, Kide remains an extremely influential figure within the organization.

Another person in CCIFR has long been of interest to the French authorities

This is Pavel Shinsky, the second person in the chamber and its “evil genius,” according to one of its members. According to Challenges, in the first half of 2022, the French authorities even studied the possibility of adding Shinsky and Kide to the sanctions list. As a high-ranking source told the publication, “they were in development.”

Like Quidé, French-Russian Pavel Shinsky criticizes France’s position on Russia. On November 17, 2023, in a comment to the propaganda Sputnik, Shinsky expressed concern about the “colossal pressure” that the EU and the US are putting on Western companies that decide to stay in Russia.

“As director of CCI France Russie, Pavel Shinsky has repeatedly opposed the sanctions imposed in March 2014 after the events in Ukraine. On the eve of the vote in the French National Assembly, which expressed support for the lifting of sanctions, CCI France Russie made a personal request to each of the 577 deputies to support this resolution,” says Shinsky’s biography on the website of the Roscongress Foundation, created in 2007 with the goal “strengthening the image of Russia.”

In October 2015, Shinsky received gratitude from Vladimir Putin. According to Challenges, he has connections with the FSB.

In June 2023, Pavel Shinsky was responsible for signing an agreement between the chamber and the Russian chemical holding PhosAgro. The head of PhosAgro, Andrey Guriev, is on the European sanctions list, the publication recalls.

In October 2023, at the height of the war, Shinsky, who is passionate about winemaking, organized a fair of French wines in Moscow. The event, called “French Autumn,” brought together 18 winemakers from Languedoc, Alsace and Beaujolais. “The French who arrived voted with their feet. These are all different people. Some have been doing business with Russia for a long time and took advantage of the opportunity to present their new products. Others were in Russia for the first time, which perhaps testifies to their musketeer enthusiasm. However, none of them had any concerns,” Shinsky said about the salon participants in an interview with the RIA Novosti propaganda agency.

“I am impressed by the idea expressed this year at the congress of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs about the need to introduce the concept of a “friendly company from an unfriendly country.” I think it would be worth actively using this formula in our relationships. For example, the winemakers who came to Moscow were definitely friendly,” noted the director of the Franco-Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.