Spicy Dumas tale only a foretaste of epic scandal

"The only mistake he made was having loved me," Christine DeviersJonc our told Paris Match in the early stages of the corruption scandal which this week led Roland Dumas to resign as president of France's Constitutional Council.

And what a mistake it was, destroying the brilliant legal and political career of Francois Mitterrand's two-time foreign minister. Not only has the 77-year-old Mr Dumas been forced to relinquish France's fifth-highest office; on Thursday, the Paris High Court announced that his trial will take place from June 19th until July 3rd. If convicted on charges of misappropriation of corporate funds, Mr Dumas could be sentenced to up to five years in prison and fined the equivalent of £300,000.

It would all blow over in a few weeks, Mr Dumas promised Ms Deviers-Joncour when police showed up at dawn to search her 18th-century Paris apartment in November 1997. While investigating the twisted dealings of Elf Aquitaine, the then state-owned oil conglomerate with an annual turnover of £24 billion, judges received an anonymous tip-off that Elf had paid £2.04 million for Ms Deviers-Joncour's apartment.

Ms Deviers-Joncour spent five months in erogis (2nd eee acute prison, where she began writing her first book, The Whore of the Republic, in which she steadfastly maintained her former lover's innocence. Her second book was a semi-pornographic novel about the sex life of a cabinet minister and his mistress. By the time she wrote her third tome, Ms Deviers-Joncour, now 52, had turned on Dumas, whom she accuses of having turned her into "a living credit card". During the Cold War, she wrote, he even collaborated with the KGB.

After Mr Dumas used his influence to obtain a bogus job for Ms Deviers-Joncour at Elf in 1989, she milked the oil company for £7.75 million, of which £5.4 million went into her Swiss bank accounts. Much of the remainder was frittered away on the 18th-century apartment and expensive dinners with Mr Dumas. Ms Deviers-Joncour spent an average £24,000 each month on her company credit card.

"It was as if [Elf] were handing out caramels - like a little girl's dream," she told judges.

Mr Dumas's second mistake - after carrying on publicly for years with the woman he called "my Mata Hari" - was snubbing her when she was released from prison. For another 11 months, she waited in vain to hear "from the man I loved so much". Then, in March 1999, Ms Deviers-Joncour decided to get even, asking Judge Eva Joly for an appointment, during which she poured out everything she knew about Mr Dumas.

Although they stand accused of far worse offences, it was Ms Deviers-Joncour's purchase with her Elf credit card of a pair of hand-made Berluti shoes (price: £1,302) for Mr Dumas that captured the public imagination. Not many French people could afford such extravagances, and like Charlie Haughey's Charvet shirts, the shoes came to symbolise the whole scandal.

Yet Christine and Roland's £7.75 million spree is barely an anecdote in the far greater epic tale of Elf Aquitaine.

Alfred Sirven, the former number two at Elf, has been on the run for three years and is believed to be living in the Philippines. Judges accuse Mr Sirven of siphoning off a staggering £360 million from the oil company. He is to be tried in absentia in June.

Also among the seven defendants are Loik Le FlochPrigent, whom Francois Mitterrand appointed to head Elf when the socialists came to power in 1981, and Andre Tarallo, a classmate of President Jacques Chirac's who headed Elf operations in Africa for nearly 40 years, and was another of Ms Deviers-Joncour's former lovers.

Gen de Gaulle created Elf to compete with US oil companies and to serve as a sort of intelligence service in Africa, where it helped dictators to take power and then propped them up. Most of the company's early directors were intelligence agents.

It also served as a giant slush fund for the Gaullists, and when Mr Mitterrand became president he wanted the socialists to have their share too. Elf's largesse towards Mr Dumas was modest by comparison with the commissions it paid - and mistresses it maintained - for corrupt officials abroad. Mercifully, the company was privatised and absorbed by Totalfina last year.

Elf, it may be remembered, paid a £30.7 million commission on the 1992 purchase of the Leuna oil refinery in the former East Germany - allegedly a disguised gift from Francois Mitterrand to his friend Helmut Kohl's CDU party.

And no French corruption scandal would be complete without Edith Cresson, the former prime minister and former European Commissioner who brought down the Brussels Commission last year. She had used EU funds to hire her home-town dentist as an AIDS "expert". Mrs Cresson, like Mr Dumas, was an intimate friend of Mr Mitterrand.

So perhaps it isn't surprising that Mrs Cresson was also on the Elf payroll. Between her resignation as France's prime minister in 1992 and her departure for Brussels two years later, Mrs Cresson received £216,086 from Elf Aquitaine International, the Swiss subsidiary that also paid Mr Dumas's mistress.

Mrs Cresson insists the money represented legitimate fees for consultancy work she did on the Leuna refinery purchase. Hmmm.