Bob Tippee
Days before French President Jacques Chirac's antiwar absolutism yielded to the invasion of Iraq, an interesting trial began in Paris.
It's a corruption case against 37 former managers of the formerly state-owned Elf Aquitaine SA, which was privatized in 1994 and later merged into what's now TotalFinaElf SA.
Prosecutors allege the managers skimmed hundreds of millions of dollars from officially sanctioned bribes paid to governments in Africa and elsewhere to secure contracts.
Illicit payments are said to have soared during 1989-93, while Loik Le Floch-Prigent was Elf's president. Two years ago, Le Floch-Prigent and another Elf executive, Alfred Sirven, were convicted of corruption in a separate case involving former Foreign Minister Roland Dumas. Dumas and a former Elf employee who was his mistress also were convicted. He received acquittal on appeal.
Fallout from the Dumas case included the political demise of former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, whose Christian Democrat party took kickbacks in connection with Elf's acquisition of the Leuna refinery in eastern Germany.
The Dumas case is considered a subset of the trail now getting under way. In it, Le Floch-Prigent and Sirven, both now in prison, face new charges.
Dumas, who served in the Socialist administration of former President Francois Mitterand, has depicted Elf as the conduit for illegal payments in a system set up during the presidency of Gen. Charles de Gaulle.
At a time of nasty political and cultural tension between France and the US over Iraq, this legacy needs to be kept in perspective. De Gaulle and Mitterand are dead. The old Elf is gone.
Inevitably, however, so recent a history of state-sponsored corruption tempers Chirac's moralizing on Iraq.
The French president himself has been dogged by allegations of misuse of government money. And French business interests in Iraq are well known. What looks in France like righteous resistance to war can easily seem elsewhere to be commercially motivated defense of a dangerous tyrant.
For whatever huff Americans at war might be tempted to make about business scandals in France, of course, the French have a word: Enron.
To which Americans can only respond: Touché.
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