Anyone in the French community of Moscow who has done business with Russia knows this man who co-founded this Franco-Russian chamber of commerce and industry 25 years ago. In his sixties, single, Emmanuel Quidet is today the “indispensable”, the “pivotal man”… The one through whom we necessarily pass whether we are a business manager, diplomat, politician and that we interested in Russia.
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Moscow is his second home, even if he speaks Russian “like a spanish cow”, he declares. He arrived there in the mid-1990s. After a fairly linear career: he graduated from the European Business School in 1985 in Paris and immediately set foot at Ernst and Young, which he never left. He does consulting, first in Paris, he covers Africa and the Middle East for several years, he also goes through Pennsylvania, before being sent to Moscow where he is still a partner.
This central place in Moscow was undoubtedly played out during the “golden decade”, the 2000s. And it was not Quidet alone, but the duo he formed, the rather calm consultant and a certain Jean-Luc Pipon, colorful business lawyer. After the difficult 1990s for business following the fall of the Soviet Union, the two men are surfing on these 2000s. The French diaspora jostles for their “wine and cheese evenings”. Along with ambassadors and heads of economic missions, they receive and support all those who want to invest the smallest euro in Russia. The Medef often makes the trip. “An era full of excess, with a Las Vegas side”said to me, a little sibylline, one of their regular interlocutors. “The money is flowing, without there being any well-established legislation yet.”
An international business lawyer Frédéric Belot describes the same effervescence in France around these relations with Russia, with “practically every week, an event (meeting/symposium/cocktail) in Paris”. This is the time when Dominique de Villepin, Prime Minister will launch with his counterpart Mikhail Fradkov the “Franco-Russian dialogue”, co-chaired by the boss of Renault, Louis Schweitzer. Jean-Luc Pipon will then set up his own firm to work with Russian companies. Emmanuel Quidet then finds himself on the front line and even more, since the sudden death of his accomplice three years ago.
With power, his relations are neat to say the least! Since the spring of 2022, he has been on the board of directors of Novatek, the gas giant allied with total Energies, of his friend the oligarch Gennadi Timtchenko. He is reputed never to criticize Moscow but rather Western sanctions against Russia, which has long earned him a strong pro-Putin reputation. In 2015, in the midst of the first period Ukrainian crisis which was already chilling French investors, Serguei Lavrov, Minister of Foreign Affairs, took malicious pleasure in presenting him with a medal for his “contribution to international cooperation”.
Since the signing of the presidential ukase on Monday, Emmanuel Quidet has not spoken on his new Russian passport. We obviously asked for it… without success. Other media as well. He is the 28th in this list of naturalized which includes 72 foreigners (including Edward Snowden, the American whistleblower, as well as 11 other French, mostly descendants of white Russian emigrants.) He had obviously made the request a long time ago . In any case, the news is causing quite a stir in the French community, especially in the midst of a referendum on annexations in Ukraine and when dual nationals (including him theoretically!) can now be “mobilized” for the Ukrainian front.
“It’s probably because he wants to stay in Russia”, simply concluded one of my sources. In fact, even if many French people have left since the spring, even if the newspaper Mail from Russia that he had created has been closed, Emmanuel Quidet does not seem ready to pack his bags.