She has been called the most powerful woman in France, the terror of the financial and industrial establishment.

Judge Eva Joly (55), came to Paris from Norway in 1960 as an au pair girl, studied law, married a Frenchman and worked her way up through the judiciary system. As France's leading magistrate in financial corruption cases, Ms Joly has dared to put executives from the Alcatel company, and the Worms, CCF and Credit Lyonnais banks under investigation.

One of her targets, the former socialist minister and convicted felon, Bernard Tapie, calls her "a sick woman".

Working with another female judge, Laurence Vichnievsky, Ms Joly has now taken on the former Foreign Minister, Roland Dumas, whose long-time mistress received Ffr 66 million (£7.86 million) from the state-owned oil company, Elf Aquitaine. Ms Joly sent Elf's former CEO, Loik Le Floch-Prigent, to prison for six months and is still tracing billions of francs in Elf bribes and slush funds.

Crusading magistrates, the imprisonment of business executives and at least three former government ministers, commissions for public sector contracts and bribery in commercial tribunals. No wonder Italian journalists here now speak of the "Italianisation" of France.

In addition to the Elf scandal, Ms Joly and Judge Jean-Pierre Zanoto are working out the intricacies of years of fraud and mismanagement at the Credit Lyonnais, which have cost the French government up to Ffr 147 billion in bail-outs.

Public sector contracts which account for 10 per cent of the French GNP are a major source of corruption. Instead of being awarded to the lowest bidder, each contract is negotiated individually, with the winner often paying a commission to the local official or his political party. A dozen judicial investigations are currently delving into the links between Paris municipal contracts and the financing of the Gaullist RPR.

The 30 magistrates of the "financial gallery" of the Paris Palais de Justice have pursued corrupt politicians and businessmen with little more than sweat and brains. Some judges even had to purchase their own computers. Ms Joly is unearthing billions of francs in stolen taxpayers' money from a tiny 18-square metre office at the Palais de Justice. Last winter, she appealed for "decent working conditions" for herself and her colleagues.

The French Minister of Justice, Elisabeth Guigou, responded to the plea. By the end of this year, 30 financial magistrates and 52 civil servants will move from the Palais de Justice to the former Le Monde building at 5 rue des Italiens, four metro stops away. They are to constitute the French judiciary system's first pole financier to cope

with the avalanche of corruption cases.

For the first time, the investigating judges will be assisted by young lawyers who have specialised in fiscal and business law, as well as experts from the stock exchange commission and the Treasury. The Paris pole is to serve as a model for similar set-ups in Bastia, Marseille, Lyon, Fort-de-France and Bordeaux.

But despite improved means to fight financial crime within France, judges say the system remains ill-adapted to the globalisation of white-collar crime whose annual worldwide turnover is estimated at $800 billion (£571 million) by the French magistrate and writer, Jean de Maillard.

Ill-gotten gains rarely stay in the country. "When it comes to international networks, judges cannot advance in their investigations," Judge Renaud Van Ruymbeke of the Rennes Appeals Court told Le Monde. He was one of seven European magistrates who signed the October 1st, 1996, Geneva appeal for "a real European judiciary area".

Some 500 French judges have since signed the appeal, which asks that international warrants be transmitted directly from judge to judge, without passing through time-consuming diplomatic channels and justice ministries. Luxembourg is an EU member, Mr Van Ruymbeke noted, but it sometimes takes two to three years to obtain information on an account there. By contrast, it takes only a few minutes to open a numbered account, a few seconds to move funds around the world electronically.

A year and a half after they began their campaign for European co-operation against white collar crime, "unfortunately, nothing has really changed on the ground", Mr Van Ruymbeke said. "As soon as an affair crosses borders, it bogs down."

Earlier, he blamed politicians for the absence of progress. "Why would you expect European leaders to make a real effort to do away with the dirty money networks they use to stay in power?"

Meanwhile, two socialist members of the French National Assembly, Francois Colcombet and Arnaud Montebourg, have opened a can of worms with their July report on French commercial tribunals.

By tradition, commercial judges are volunteers drawn from industry and the business community. From within their cosy conferie, they choose agents to liquidate bankrupt companies 7,000 a year in Paris alone. The agents pay themselves from the funds of the troubled businesses often between Ffr 7 million and Ffr 15 million per year Mr Montebourg told the Nouvel Observateur. "Ten per cent (of the agents) are currently under investigation or have been convicted of serious crimes," he added. "And the fate of hundreds of thousands of jobs lies in the hands of these people!"

In a letter last month to the Paris prosecutor, Messers Colcombet and Montebourg related the main findings of their investigation and asked that criminal proceedings be initiated in four affairs handled by the Paris commercial tribunal. In one instance, Le Palace nightclub was sold in June to a former tribunal official for Ffr 7.5 million one sixth of an earlier offer rejected by the tribunal.

In another current case involving the Paris commercial tribunal, the deputies said they could not understand why it allowed the Royal Monceau Hotel to continue operating last year when its owner, the Syrian businessman, Osman Aidi, had accumulated Ffr 2 billion in debt.

In his report, Mr Montebourg wrote that "a person linked to one of the candidates for the purchase of the Royal-Monceau group . . . had been asked to pay commissions destined for the tribunal".