A JUDICIAL crusade against political sleaze in France came to an abrupt halt yesterday when Roland Dumas, the former Foreign Minister, won his appeal against a conviction for corruption in connection with the oil group, Elf Aquitaine.

M Dumas, a close ally of François Mitterrand who went on to become head of the country’s highest legal institution, the Constitutional Council, was acquitted by the Paris Appeal Court.

“I am happy that justice has been done,” said M Dumas, 80, after the judgment quashed a lower court ruling that he should serve six months in prison.

His lawyer, Jean-René Farthouat, denounced the four-year prosecution that had led to M Dumas’s resignation from the Constitutional Council. “They were on the verge of imprisoning him, they imposed humiliating bail conditions on him and, after all that, we discover that he had done nothing wrong from a penal point of view,” he said.

The Appeal Court was more severe with M Dumas’s co-defendants. It upheld the sentence given to Christine Deviers-Joncour, his former mistress, who received an 18-month prison term, of which 12 months were suspended. Loik Le Floch- Prigent, chairman of Elf Aquitaine from 1989 to 1993, had his 40-month jail term reduced to 30 months, and Alfred Sirven, its director- general in the same period, had a year cut from his four-year sentence.

The Appeal Court ruling has put the lid on a sensational affair in French politics. Prosecutors said that the Elf group had given Mme Deviers-Joncour Fr45 million (about £4.5 million) and a luxury penthouse in Paris to curry favour with her lover, who was then M Mitterrand’s Foreign Minister.

They claimed that M Dumas knew about and benefited from the deal. He had used the penthouse in the Rue de Lille and got Mme Deviers-Joncour to buy him presents, including Greek statues worth Fr300,000 and a pair of hand-made shoes for Fr1,700.

When the case came to court in 2001, it seemed to symbolise an attempt by investigating magistrates to attack a French political world that had grown used to easy money and shady practices.

M Dumas was the most prominent in a long line of figures to be charged in connection with corruption, and his lower court conviction was seen as a signal for politiciansto mend their ways.

However, commentators said Eva Joly, the investigating judge, had failed to prove that M Dumas was aware of the sleaze lapping at his door. His supporters said that he was simply lovestruck and blind to Mme Deviers-Joncour’s double-dealing.

Yesterday’s ruling represents a severe setback for Mme Joly, who has since resigned and returned to her native Norway, and an encouragement for politicians across France.

In March, 35 defendants, including M Le Floch-Prigent and M Sirven, will go on trial in the second Elf Aquitaine case, charged with orchestrating a vast programme of bribes and kickbacks.

The case will highlight the corruption that reigned at Elf until the middle of the 1990s, but is unlikely to shed light on the group’s links with French politics. M Dumas’s victory means that those links may be buried for ever.

Slush fund claims

Elf Aquitaine, now part of France’s TotalFinaElf group, remains at the centre of allegations that its executives managed a complex lobbying network. It is alleged that Alfred Sirven, a former Elf Aquitaine executive, controlled a slush fund on behalf of the company from Switzerland; that illegal payments were made to ensure the £1.29 billion sale of six warships to Taiwan by another French state-owned business group, Thomson-CSF; and that illicit commissions were paid for French firms in Africa, Latin America and Europe. It is also alleged that bribes were made in 1992 to the German CDU party, which was then led by Helmut Kohl.

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