Paris. "A loan, as promised": Stolen from the Grévin Museum, the statue of Emmanuel Macron was placed in front of the EDF headquarters.

The statue of Emmanuel Macron will be returned to the Grévin Museum. The NGO Greenpeace returned the wax statue of the French President, stolen from the Parisian institution the day before, on Tuesday evening. Activists placed it in front of the EDF headquarters in Paris to denounce the economic ties, particularly in the energy sector, between France and Russia.

"We came to bring back the statue of Emmanuel Macron because, as we promised from the start, it's a loan," Jean-François Julliard, director general of Greenpeace France, told AFP near the EDF headquarters in central Paris. "We notified both the management of the Grévin Museum and the police. It's up to them to come and retrieve it," he said.

The statue was brought in shortly after 11 p.m. in a trunk, from which it was removed for a few minutes to be displayed on the forecourt in front of the energy group's headquarters, with a sign from the NGO reading "Putin-Macron Radioactive Allies."

The EDF headquarters was chosen "to make Macron face up to his responsibilities in the trade he maintains with Russia, particularly in the nuclear sector," explained Jean-François Julliard.

The statue, worth 40,000 euros, had been stolen the day before by Greenpeace activists who then left it in front of the Russian embassy located in the 16th arrondissement (west) of the capital. The action in front of the embassy lasted only a few minutes. A Russian flag was unfurled behind the statue of Emmanuel Macron, and an activist from the NGO held up a fluorescent yellow sign reading "Business is business." Greenpeace members threw counterfeit banknotes.

The NGO wants to protest against economic ties between France and Russia in the gas, chemical fertilizer, and nuclear sectors. For Jean-François Julliard, French companies can continue "to import a whole host of products from Russia, whether it's enriched uranium to run French nuclear power plants, natural uranium that transits through Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan via Russia, or liquefied natural gas (...) or chemical fertilizers."