May 30, 2001
A French court convicted former Foreign Minister Roland Dumas on Wednesday and sentenced him to six months in prison in a multimillion dollar kickback trial that has enthralled France. The 78-year-old former minister was charged with receiving illegal funds from the state-owned Elf Aquitaine oil company between 1989 and 1992 while he was foreign minister. The court also handed Dumas a two-year suspended sentence.
Dumas' former lover, Christine Deviers-Joncour, who prosecutors say reaped $9 million from Elf for her work as a lobbyist after Dumas got her a job at the company, was sentenced to three years in prison, half of which was suspended. Dumas was also ordered to pay a fine of $854,000 while Deviers-Joncour, 53, was fined $1.3 million by the court. There was no immediate word of whether Dumas and Deviers-Joncour would appeal the court's decision.
The verdict for Dumas -- a French Resistance fighter during World War II who later rose through political ranks to become a leading Socialist -- completes the dapper politician's fall from grace. After the Elf scandal broke, Dumas was forced to resign as head of the French Constitutional Council -- France's highest judicial authority.
Former Elf President Loik Le Floch-Prigent, 57, was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison and ordered to pay a $260,000 fine. Alfred Sirven, a former second-in-command at the company and one of France's most notorious fugitives, was sentenced to four years in prison and also fined. The defendants were all charged with misuse of company funds.
During the trial, prosecutors said Dumas got Deviers-Joncour a phony job at Elf to create a direct link between the Foreign Ministry and the oil company -- and then benefitted from the gifts that the company lavished on his mistress. Dumas denied knowing that the gifts and other perks -- including a luxury apartment on the chic Left Bank, a dozen antique Greek statuettes and a pair of custom-made boots worth $1,500 -- were aimed at winning his support for the multimillion dollar sale of six French frigates to Taiwan's navy.
The trial exposed a web of corruption at Elf Aquitaine, which prosecutors say was used to channel money in numerous kickback schemes, including the frigate sale. Elf Aquitaine was taken over last year by the French-Belgian group TotalFina.
The frigate sale is the subject of a separate inquiry, although during the Dumas trial, Deviers-Joncour testified that she received $6.4 million from a slush fund at Elf in return for her efforts to persuade Dumas to support the sale of the frigates.
One of the highlights of the trial was supposed to be the eagerly awaited testimony of Sirven, who was portrayed as the point man for a multimillion dollar slush fund at Elf. But the 74-year-old refused to testify. Sirven fled France four years ago but was captured in February in the Philippines after an 11-month manhunt that led investigators up and down the country through more than 20 cities. He was put on a flight to Germany, where authorities held him for four days in a futile attempt to question him about another scandal -- bribes allegedly paid in the sale to Elf of the Leuna oil refinery in the former communist East Germany.
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