PortraitThis aristocrat and former trader had effectively taken care of the financing of the campaign of his friend François Fillon. Coveted by the right and the far right, he put his very extensive address book at the service of Michel Barnier.
Sitting on the terrace of Le Concorde café, a stone’s throw from the National Assembly, he cheerfully greets passers-by in the neighborhood, these upscale Parisians 7e arrondissement, which he all seems to know. After hailing one of them to invite him to come to dinner “Home soon”, he turns around and slides: “Did you recognize him?” It’s Frédéric Mitterrand. “ Arnaud de Montlaur has natural interpersonal skills. It is in this capacity that François Fillon had entrusted him, in the fall of 2015, with the task of raising funds for his campaign for the 2017 presidential election.
For several weeks, he has been coveted by the staffs of right-wing and far-right candidates. “They make me calls with their feet, he recounts. Eric Zemmour called me this summer. Then I was contacted by the teams of Valérie Pécresse, Xavier Bertrand, Michel Barnier. “ Until last summer, he sided with Bruno Retailleau, the boss of senators Les Républicains (LR), a time presidential candidate before giving up, at the end of August. “ I understood that there would be no open primary. I disappointed Arnaud a lot, relates Bruno Retailleau, but it didn’t affect our friendship. “
A friendship sealed by their total loyalty to their champion, François Fillon, released from all sides at the height of the campaign, after the revelations on the suspicions of fictitious employment of his wife. Finally, Arnaud de Montlaur chose, at the beginning of October, to ride for Michel Barnier. He loves his “Great determination”, her “Good knowledge of Europe”, and sees in him a continuity with François Fillon. “It’s a very nice point that he never left LR, the party will be sensitive to it”, he adds. And Zemmour ? “Few people around me support him. It is very focused around a single subject, the Arabs. “
A little note written on subprimes
Arnaud de Montlaur entered the small world of politics somewhat by chance. The provincial aristocrat, born in Vichy in Allier, now owner of his father’s farm, left the family estate at 18 for Paris. He does not join the benches of the university, but enters, after an internship at the Stock Exchange, at the auction of the Palais Brongniart. First a stockbroker, he became a market operator when the profession became computerized at the end of the 1990s.
Father of three children, installed 500 meters from the National Assembly, he likes to say that he is as comfortable with his biker friends as with an old provincial aristocrat. He worked as a trader at Dexia when the 2008 financial crisis hit, which saw the Franco-Belgian bank go bankrupt.
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