Global Policy Forum

By John Tagliabue

A French court today overturned the corruption conviction of Roland Dumas, a former foreign minister, provoking cries of a judicial double standard.

Mr. Dumas, 80, silver-haired and sharp-tongued, had been sentenced in May 2001 to six months in jail and fined $130,000 for taking illegal gifts from his mistress, Christine Deviers-Joncour, a former lingerie model and a lobbyist for the oil group Elf Aquitaine. The case linked politicians and business executives in a vast kickback scheme in which company slush funds were used to buy influence.

Among the gifts Ms. Deviers-Joncour acknowledged having given Mr. Dumas were valuable ancient Greek statuettes and a $1,700 pair of shoes. Mr. Dumas always denied having known that the gifts were paid for with money from Elf, now part of TotalFinaElf.

The appeals court said little about the grounds for its decision, but essentially found there had not been sufficient proof that Mr. Dumas had known the source of the money.

Ms. Deviers-Joncour, who possessed few professional qualifications, was put on the Elf payroll and paid millions of dollars. She later described her role in the scandal in a book that became a best seller, "The Whore of the Republic." The scandal lifted the veil on the machinations of power in France as they existed in the early 1990's, when Franí§ois Mitterrand was president and corruption appeared rampant.

The allegations date from before Elf was privatized, in 1994, in an era when the government often used the giant oil group as a foreign policy instrument.

The investigation ultimately implicated more than 40 people, but Mr. Dumas, a close associate of Mr. Mitterrand, was among the most widely known.

Mr. Dumas, leaving the courtroom, told reporters, `'I am happy that justice has been done me."

His lawyer, Jean-René Farthouat, said, "I saw his eyes fill with tears, and I also wept."

But the verdict was immediately attacked as providing evidence of a double standard in the courts.

"In our country there is a justice for ordinary citizens, and a justice for others," said Arnaud Montebourg, a muckraking Socialist legislator in the National Assembly. Mr. Montebourg said Mr. Dumas, who was forced to step down as president of the Constitutional Court, the highest legal body in France, when the allegations were raised against him, had nonetheless benefited from public assertions of support by numerous members of the government and the French establishment.

Noí«l Mamí¨re, a legislator from the small Greens party, said, "Justice can be indulgent for the powerful, and intractable for the poor."

The court affirmed the convictions of five other defendants, including Ms. Deviers-Joncour; the former president of Elf, Loí¯k Le Floch-Prigent; and Alfred Sirven, another former Elf executive, though it shortened some of the original sentences.

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