Cherchez La Femme!

By THOMAS SANCTON/PARIS

Roland Dumas had it all. Suave, wealthy and well connected, the silver-haired lawyer, art collector and bon vivant reveled in a life of power and influence. Picasso and Giacometti were his clients. His long list of female conquests included opera singers and models. His best friend was the late Socialist President Francois Mitterrand, who twice named him Foreign Minister and in 1995 appointed him President of the Constitutional Council, roughly equivalent to the U.S. Supreme Court, making Dumas France's fifth highest-ranking official. But that charmed life seemed on the verge of imploding last week when two French judges drove to his sumptuous home near Bordeaux and formally placed the 75-year-old Dumas under investigation for corruption in connection with a wide-ranging probe of France's Elf Aquitaine oil company.

Dumas, if eventually found guilty, will have been brought down by his two lifelong passions: money and women. The trail that led investigators to his doorstep began with a femme fatale, Christine Deviers-Joncour, 51, a sultry, high-living brunet who sluiced millions out of Elf's coffers to buy a palatial Paris apartment, designer clothes, fancy restaurant meals, exotic vacations--and a $2,000 pair of handmade boots for her protector Roland Dumas. Whether Deviers-Joncour and Elf were also the source of the millions of dollars that Dumas deposited in his personal bank accounts from 1991 to 1995, much of it in cash, is what the magistrates are seeking to find out.

Dumas's troubles started a year ago when Paris-based judges Eva Joly and Laurence Vichnievsky began looking into the exorbitant commissions paid by Elf in conjunction with the $2.7 billion sale of six French frigates to Taiwan in 1991. Elf, then state owned, had no official involvement in the sale of the vessels. But an investigation into complaints of unjustified commissions soon led to Elf lobbyist Deviers-Joncour, who admitted that the oil company had paid her some $10 million to promote the sale. Her mission was to persuade Dumas to reverse his opposition to the deal. But, she said, she was unsuccessful.

Her claims were potentially devastating for Dumas, who had allegedly intervened to get her a $120,000-a-year sinecure at Elf in 1989 and had taken her along with him on numerous official, and unofficial, trips abroad. It did not help matters that Dumas had also allowed his lady friend to wine and dine him--and buy him the now infamous hand-made boots--on an Elf credit card that she used to the tune of $40,000 a month.

There was speculation that Dumas might be jailed last week. But when the judges arrived at his country estate, where he was recovering from abdominal surgery, they left him free on more than $800,000 bail and forbade him to travel to various tax havens such as Switzerland and Monaco, where it is suspected he keeps secret bank accounts. Dumas adamantly denies all allegations--and even claims to have repaid the cost of the boots. In an interview last March, he declared he had "never received a cent" from the Taiwan contract and never wavered in his opposition to the sale.

Pending the outcome of his case, Dumas is under increasing pressure to resign from his prestigious Constitutional Council post. But unless he goes voluntarily or is convicted, there is no legal way of giving him the boot.

--By Thomas Sancton/Paris