October 2023, a stone’s throw from the Stock Exchange, in Paris. Jordan Bardella and Pierre-Edouard Stérin meet at the gourmet table of the Fleur de Pav restaurant, in 2e borough. The young president of the National Rally (RN) inquires with the Catholic billionaire, 104e French fortune, tips for investors to spot the « value for money ». The founder of Smartbox, tax exile in Belgium and also opposed to women’s right to voluntary termination of pregnancy (IVG), does not find Bardella exceptional but sees in him his foe on the extreme right. THE « go between » between the two men? The polytechnician François Durvye, well-trimmed beard and thin glasses, number two of Stérin within Otium Capital, his investment fund weighing 1.2 billion euros, and shadow advisor to the RN.
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A month later, in November 2023, Marine and her sister Yann Le Pen signed with François Durvye the deed of sale of the family property in Rueil-Malmaison, where Jean-Marie and Jany Le Pen live, as revealed by the magazine Challenges. When, at the beginning of 2023, François Durvye discovered the columned house opening onto the 1,600 square meter garden, in the absence of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was hospitalized, he was amazed. And spent, with the help of a real estate company, which he created during the summer with his wife and Pierre-Edouard Stérin, 2.5 million euros to acquire this 300 square meter residence, equipped with nine rooms, a swimming pool and an outbuilding for the staff. Furniture, trinkets, sailboat models and Asian prints are left out of the sale. But the Le Pens get a comfortable financial income from it.
The Durvye-Stérin duo therefore owns the house where the co-founder of the National Front, who has just celebrated his 96th birthday, still lives. A villa where Jordan Bardella went a few months ago for his first long interview with Jean-Marie Le Pen, as if to maintain family continuity. From one generation to the next, the Le Pen clan surrounds itself with one or other of the extreme right tendencies. Marine Le Pen has gradually swapped the “GUD Connection”, too inclined to participate in neo-Nazi and neofascist parades in the heart of Paris, against the « Versailles Connection »in the words of a veteran of the Marinist circle.
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How did François Durvye and the Stérin galaxy find themselves at the heart of the Lepéniste system? It was another Versaillais, the “tradi catholic” Renaud Labaye, trained in Saint-Cyr and right-hand man of Marine Le Pen, who introduced him in 2021 to the presidential candidate. The two forties met in the royal city, the epicenter of the reactionary right. “A well-made head, a guy who thinks like us, it was interesting that he worked for Marine”, confirms the former secretary general of the RN group in the National Assembly. His profile evokes another financier, who has advised Marine Le Pen for even longer: the Catholic investor Alexis Rostand, graduate of HEC and teacher at Paris-Dauphine, who works between London and Paris at the head of a management company. assets and the think tank Ora et Labora – “prayer and work”, named after the Benedictine motto. His credo: “integral ethical finance”, which seeks to harmonize money and the social doctrine of the Church.
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