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| Roland Dumas |
Mr Duma, France's fifth-highest ranking official, is awaiting trial for allegedly accepting some of the £250m that the oil giant Elf Aquitane is thought to have spent in the early 1990s to further its own interests and those of the late president.
The long-awaited announcement from Mitterrand's confidant came as public prosecutors promised to start investigating Edith Cresson, France's first woman prime minister, in the same affair.
Slowly but surely, Elf's slick of sleaze is beginning to spread to the upper reaches of French political life. And as frantically as they may paddle to escape it, some of the most important members of the late president's entourage will not, this time, avoid being tarred.
Mr Dumas, 76, has been a member of France's political and cultural elite for four decades. He was twice foreign minister during Mitterrand's 14-year presidency and, as a lawyer in private practice, held briefs for renowned artists such as Matisse and Giacometti. He was the executor of Picasso's will, and played a role in returning his masterpiece Guernica to Spain.
Mr Dumas, dubbed by one French paper as "the prince of intrigue in Mitterrand's palace", will stand trial this autumn for complicity in the misuse of Elf funds. He is alleged first to have persuaded Elf to employ his then mistress, Christine Deviers-Joncour, a former lingerie model who has written three bitter if entertaining kiss-and-tell books about her experiences, one entitled Whore of the Republic.
Once installed at the then state-owned multinational, Ms Deviers-Joncour has admitted, she received some £6.6m from Elf to lobby her lover to approve the controversial 1991 sale of six frigates to Taiwan by another state-controlled firm, Thompson. Elf had allegedly promised Thompson, in exchange for a slice of the profits, to use its influence to help push through the sale, which was strongly opposed by China and initially by Mr Dumas himself - until he suddenly changed his mind.
To help her in her task, Elf allegedly furnished Ms Deviers-Joncour with a monthly £20,000 company credit line and a £1.7m Left Bank flat.
Mr Dumas, who used the rue de Lille apartment to host lavish operatic soirées for le tout Paris, has been unable to explain several million stray francs that found their way into his bank account. But he has denied any wrong-doing, saying he was unaware where the money - or the gifts - came from. The prosecutor's case against him is that this cannot possibly be true.
In the six years that they have been investigating the Elf scandal, the magistrates Eva Joly and Laurence Vichnievsky have placed more than 20 people under investigation. Among those also accused or suspected of benefiting from Elf's generosity are the company's former boss, Mitterrand's golf partner, a former Gaullist interior minister and a well-known woman novelist. The defence of Elf's embattled ex-president, Loik Le Floch Prigent, has always been that he acted according to a deal worked out with Mitterrand.
"I'm being made a scapegoat," he said last year. "It's easier to crush me than to investigate the role of France itself, which benefited enormously from this subtle game of shadows and light, which I inherited but did not start or gain from."
That does not quite explain how he could increase his company credit card debit by £6,800, spent on CDs in a single afternoon. Nor does it explain how Laurent Raillard, Mitterrand's doctor and twice-weekly golf partner, came to benefit from an Elf salary of £5,000 a month.
Meanwhile, investigators are expected to turn soon to the case of the former Gaullist interior minister Charles Pasqua, who allegedly travelled free on Elf's private jets under the codename "Fernandel" and whose senior advisers were apparently on the company's payroll.
They are already looking into Françoise Sagan, the author of Bonjour Tristesse, who allegedly received £900,000 from an Elf go-between known as "Dédé the Sardine" in exchange for persuading the president to intervene on a contract in Uzbekistan.
The alleged chief fixer and bagman for most of the missing millions, Elf's former corporate affairs director Alfred Sirven, has been on the run for the past three years. The subject of an international arrest warrant, he is thought to be hiding in a suburb of the Philippines' capital Manila.
As the investigating magistrates' net spreads, more senior figures from the Mitterrand era are finding themselves trapped. Mitterrand, who died in 1996, was himself implicated last month following so far unproven allegations that he ordered £10m of Elf's cash to be slid into his friend Helmut Kohl's 1994 re-election campaign.
Above all, it is the dark shadow of Mitterrand that floats over this entire tangled affair. If nothing else, Mr Dumas's trial will hammer a final nail into the coffin of what remains of the marred reputation of France's first Socialist president.
Sources: The Guardian
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