On May 20, the hearing of a French billionaire before a parliamentary inquiry committee was intended to lift the lid on what the committee had earlier called an "outright ecosystem of political conquest."

The lid, however, had to be kept tight because Pierre-Edouard Sterin didn't show up to the National Assembly.

Originally, French lawmakers wanted to question the billionaire founder of Smartbox — a company that sells experience gifts — on his Pericles project, through which he's invested about €30 million ($34.24 million) in initiatives promoting his conservative values.

"Yesterday, Mr Sterin told us he wanted to testify via video link for security reasons," the committee's president, Thomas Cazenave, said.

"I replied that we had taken appropriate measures to protect him, just like for lawmakers who regularly receive threats," Cazenave — a lawmaker for the government coalition Ensemble! — stressed, adding that he deplored Sterin's "stalling technique."

"It means we won't be able to verify whether Pericles respects French campaign rules," Cazenave added.

The Pericles project's general director, Arnaud Rerolle, had shown up for a hearing a week earlier, saying France's "economic, social and moral situation is in a dire state."

"We're an incubator on the right of the political spectrum for meta-political projects. So far, we have financed less than 15% of the 600 applications we received," he told the committee.

Among the initiatives supported by Pericles are far-right magazine L'Incorrect and the Observatoire du decolonialisme, which, for example, denounces what it calls "woke obscurantism" — a catch-all term used to decry left-wing ideologies, often centered on the identity politics of minorities.

However, Sterin is........

© Deutsche Welle