The head of the French oil giant Total SA was detained by police yesterday over suspicions that the company paid millions of dollars in bribes for its operations in an Iranian offshore gas field.

Christophe de Margerie, 55, and two directors, were summoned on the orders of Philippe Courroye, a judge who last year placed him under criminal investigation in a case involving Iraq. That concerned the company’s suspected payment of bribes to aquire supplies in the UN Oil-for-Food programme in 1999-2003.

Total, France’s biggest public company, said that it was “completely behind its executives” and insisted that the Iranian agreements were legal.

Mr Margerie, a lifelong Total executive who took over as chief last month, was questioned about the alleged payment of consulting fees involving Total’s rights to the South Pars gas field in the Gulf. Total has invested some $2 billion in the field, which is jointly exploited with the Russian Gazprom and Petronas of Malaysia. The other executives questioned were Robert Castaigne, financial director, and Philippe Boisseau, director of gas operations.

Swiss investigators uncovered evidence of illicit payments and passed the case to France last December. According to Le Monde, a total of €60 million had allegedly been paid to Iranian officials up to 2003, including sums paid into accounts controlled by a son of Hojatoleslam Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former Iranian President.

Mr de Margerie, a jovial workaholic who is nicknamed Big Moustache, was responsible for Middle East operations at the time of the South Pars deal. He told Le Monde: “The group considers that the agreements concluded in 1997 on the Iran gas contract were in total conformity with the appropriate laws.”

Mr de Margerie, a grandson of the founder of Taittinger champagne, was in charge of exploration and production when Total allegedly paid middlemen for access to Iraqi supplies in the Oil-for-Food case. He was detained for two days in October and placed formally under investigation for “complicity in the abuse of corporate funds and complicity in the corruption of foreign public servants”. Even so, the Total supervisory boardvoiced full confidence in him as its incoming chief executive.

He is also expected to be questioned about alleged money-laundering offences involving the production and marketing of oil from Cameroon.

Total executives complain privately about what they see as the excessive zeal of financial investigators. The company, which over the past decade has absorbed Petrofina and Elf, has suffered from a long bout of negative publicity. The company is a defendant in a trial over the devastating oil spill from the Erika, a tanker that was wrecked off Brittany in 1999.

Total’s Elf component was at the centre of a vast financial scandal in the 1980s under the administration of the late President Mitterrand.

Executives were involved in illicit spending of hundreds of millions of pounds of corporate funds and the company was used as an instrument of secret French diplomacy in Africa and the Middle East by the Mitterrand Government.

Executives who drained some £200 million for political favours, mistresses, jewellery, fine art and houses were eventually put on trial. They were fined millions of pounds and three were jailed.

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