French President Emmanuel Macron funded his campaign with tremendous support from the banking sector, which he himself was a part of as a former bank executive at Rothschild, investigative journal Mediapart revealed Sunday.
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The online paper reviewed all of the emails sent by Macron's campaign team, which were leaked the night before his election, and other legal documents Mediapart could access.
Some of the fundraisers were top bank executives, like Christian Dargnat, who quit his position as the CEO of BNP Paribas in April 2016 in order to join Macron's recently-created movement “En Marche.”
The investigation found that in a short period of time, Macron's campaign team succeeded in raising about US$14.5 million — all while making huge efforts to sway public opinion to forget his links to the finance world. Throughout his campaign, he insisted that he only received small donations, not large ones.
According to the movement's official record, over US$5 million had been donated until December 2016, and 70 percent of it was donated by only 669 people.
But in April 2017, when the media began pressuring Macron to reveal how he funded his campaign, his team was ordered to insist that only 1.7 percent of people donated over US$5,000.
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The fundraising campaign officially took place between April 2016, when the movement was founded, and April 2017, when Macron was elected. But it unofficially began in the spring of 2016, when Macron was still the economy minister of the former government.
Another investigation, echoed by Arret sur Images, found that Macron organized a fundraising event last October in Uccle, an upper-class neighborhood of the Belgian capital of Brussels, with over 40 of France's richest business men and women, who relocated there in order to pay fewer taxes.
In France, the electoral law imposes a maximum amount of expenses of about US$25 million for each candidate, which the French state reimburses if the candidate wins more than 5 percent of the popular vote.
The revelation comes as Macron is preparing an already-contested labor reform after only a week in office. The legislation serves to weaken labor rights, continuing efforts by the previous government, under the name of “El Khomri” bill, sparking widespread protests as well as the social movement “Nuit Debout” in Paris.
It will be implemented by Macron's new Labor Minister Muriel Penicaud, a former human resources director of giants like the world food company Danone and multinational software firm Dassault Systemes.