A PARIS court has begun to hear the case against 37 defendants at the heart of the Elf-Aquitaine corruption saga, a scandal that has tainted leaders in France and beyond.

The trial of Loik Le Floch-Prigent, a former Elf boss, and his associates, which began yesterday after an eight-year investigation, marks the final act of an affair that laid bare a system of state-sanctioned bribery and personal enrichment at the formerly state-owned oil concern.

The Elf executives and other defendants are alleged to have embezzled and otherwise abused £140 million in the late 1980s and early 1990s in schemes that ranged from the bribery of leaders of African states to the payment of millions of pounds of illicit funds over the purchase of the Leuna oil refinery in Germany. The exposure three years ago of the 1992 Leuna bribes helped to tarnish the reputation of Helmut Kohl, the former German Chancellor.

Le Floch-Prigent, 59, Alfred Sirven, 76, his chief “fixer”, and André Tarallo, 75, Elf’s Africa chief, are charged with pocketing millions from the slush funds deployed by Elf when it was allegedly run as a cash machine by the Mitterrand Government. Le Floch-Prigent, who was absent from court yesterday because of ill- health, is, among other offences, accused of using Elf funds to pay £10,000 a month in maintenance to his ex-wife and to buy homes in Paris and London. Last month he began a 30-month jail term after being convicted of bribery in a case involving Roland Dumas, the former Foreign Minister.

M Dumas was acquitted on appeal, but jail terms were upheld for Sirven, Tarallo and Christine Deviers-Joncour, the lover of M Dumas. Sirven, who was extradited two years ago from the Philippines, once boasted that he knew enough to “blow up the State ten times over”, but disclosed nothing explosive in two earlier trials.

In the 1,100-page indictment the investigating judges voiced frustration at the State’s refusal to co-operate on the ground of secrecy. Elf, which is now the publicly quoted company TotalFinaElf, had also been unforthcoming, they said. The main defendants and M Dumas have argued that Elf had just been playing a longstanding role as a source of clandestine state finances. The leaders of Gabon, Angola and Congo and other African states are mentioned in the indictment as recipients of bribes.

The investigators said that there was proof of “a large number of operations carried out on the margins of normal functioning of the group’s structures and destined . . . to collect assets off the books”.

Le Floch-Prigent told the investigators that when appointed by François Mitterrand in 1989 he had asked the President: “Do you want me to turn off the tap?” M Mitterrand had replied: “Oh, no. We will carry on with the arrangements put into place by General de Gaulle.”

Le Floch-Prigent, who ran Elf until 1993 and now depicts himself as a scapegoat, said two years ago that “all Presidents of the Republic, all their chiefs of staff, were informed about the sums and the destination countries . . . (President) Chirac knows everything I know, exactly as Mitterrand did.”

M Mitterrand had, he said, approved the payment of £20 million in secret commissions to Germany in the German oil refinery deal.

M Dumas, who was M Mitterrand’s Foreign Minister for seven years, said last month that Elf had “gradually turned into a milch cow. Its capital was used to reward African heads of state, but also — one thing leading to another — to bail out certain empty coffers.”

This was taken as further confirmation that funds had been switched back from Elf’s vast foreign bribery machine to the coffers of French political parties.

Executives at TotalFinaElf say that the corruption affair was an aberration involving individuals that was brought to an end nearly a decade ago. The company has been in the news lately because of the billions of pounds’ worth of prospective Iraqi oil contracts it has concluded in recent years.

The trial is expected to run until mid-July.

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