In addition to the "Elf affair" he referred to, there are just too many "don't remembers," and "coinkedinks" in that scandal laden article.
What was Obama doing any place close to those people in the Elf Scandal?
What was Obama's father doing when he returned to Africa?
If you don't remember about the mentioned Elf affair from that article, here's a bit more....
French elite hit by sleaze claims
Monday, 18 June, 2001, 16:29 GMT 17:29 UK
news.bbc.co.uk
Roland Dumas: Says he has been made a scapegoat
The disgraced French former Foreign Minister, Roland Dumas, has accused ministers in the current government of involvement in a corruption scandal surrounding the former state-owned oil giant, Elf.
Dumas, who was found guilty on charges relating to the Elf scandal last month, said the current foreign and employment ministers were both implicated in a web of bribes.
He told Le Figaro newspaper he had been made a scapegoat for practices common under the late President Francois Mitterrand in the 1980s and 1990s for whom he served.
He said that justice had been selective and that many known cases of misconduct were deliberately not being investigated.
Leuna affair
The current Employment Minister, Elisabeth Guigou, and Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine were, according to Mr Dumas, party to illicit payments at the time made by Elf to the then German Chancellor Helmut Kohl's Christian Democrat (CDU) party.
He claims Elf made illegal donations to the CDU in order to buy the Leuna oil refinery in East Germany after Mr Kohl made a personal appeal to then President Mitterrand and Prime Minister Balladur.
Dumas said that former Elf president Loik Le Floch-Prigent's version that he had discussed the Leuna affair with the president and that Mr Vedrine and Ms Guigou knew about it, "was certainly true".
"Mitterrand completely endorsed the project, perhaps including the payment of commissions, because he considered it useful for France," he said.
Dumas says he only found out about the affair after he left office.
Mr Vedrine, who at the time was a senior advisor to President Mitterrand, also says he only knew of the payments afterward.
He responded to the allegations angrily, saying they were "the reactions of a devastated man".
Ms Guigou, then minister for European affairs, rejected the accusations, saying: "Roland Dumas appears unable to accept the fact that this government chose not to intervene in judicial affairs".
Selective justice
Although Dumas' trial involved many prominent figures, including Le Floch-Prigent, his second-in-command, Alfred Sirven, and Dumas' mistress and former Elf employee, Christine Deviers-Joncour, it only touched on a small part of the Elf affair.
Dumas was sentenced to six months in prison for illegally receiving public funds through extravagant gifts which Deviers-Joncour lavished on him in an attempt to sway his opinion on important contracts.
But a far wider web of corruption is believed to have existed.
Dumas says the judiciary is being deliberately selective in its investigations.
"I have realised that the judiciary does not want to go right to the end of the road which leads to the truth. There is perhaps partly a wish to protect the higher interest of the country, but there is also perhaps a wish to protect those who are still in the driving seat," he said.
Taiwan
As well as accusing the ministers over the Leuna affair, he said he knew who had received payments from a contract to sell frigates to Taiwan.
He refused to name names, saying he wanted to watch how things developed, but said that those concerned knew that he knew.
He said that the President Mitterrand had been tricked into agreeing to payments to push through the contract when the contract had already been concluded.
"A batch of payments, which had no reason to exist, was added onto a contract which had already been closed, tricking my friends who gave the green light," he said.
Though Dumas has given one of the most frank accounts of the Elf affair so far, he hinted that he had even more to reveal.
"[Elf] was one of the cash-cows of the Republic. It served to maintain good relations with African heads of state and... irrigated certain networks and financed certain people. It was known. The system had been in place for a very long time."
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Elf Executives Jailed Over Fueling Corruption in Africa
globalpolicy.org
By Hector Igbikiowubo
Vanguard
November 18, 2003
France's mammoth Elf corruption case, probably the biggest political and corporate sleaze scandal to hit a western democracy since World War II, closed last Wednesday as three key former executives of the oil giant were jailed for up to five years over corrupt practices in Africa. Elf's former chairman, Loik Le Floch-Prigent, 60, was sentenced to five years in jail and fined 375,000 euros (US$375,000); his principal bag-man, the former director Alfred Sirven, was given the same prison term and ordered to pay 1 million euros.
The company's "Mr Africa," Andre Tarallo, was jailed for four years and fined 2 million euros. The judge, Michel Desplan, said Le Floch bore "the primary responsibility" for the Elf affair and was "personally behind a majority of the misappropriations". To Sirven, he said: "All this would not have happened without Le Floch, but it could not have existed without your help." The three were among 37 defendants on trial for illegally siphoning off an extraordinary 350 million euros of the then state-owned company's funds, from 1989 to 1993, while Le Floch was chairman.
The never-ending stream of cash was used to buy political favours at home and abroad, and to fund some extravagant lifestyles. But the four-month trial, which had France riveted with its tales of political graft and sumptuous living, was also that of a system of state-sanctioned sleaze that flourished in France for years: Successive politicians saw the country's state-owned multinationals not just as undercover foreign policy tools, but as a convenient source of cash to keep friends happy and enemies quiet. Le Floch, whose lawyer said yesterday his client would not be appealing to the court, insisted throughout his trial that he was in "daily contact" with the Elysee palace, and that "all the presidents of France" had known of, and condoned, the company's illicit dealings.
Elf, now privatized and part of the Total group, paid "at the very least" 5 million euros a year to all of the main French political parties to buy their support, Le Floch told the court at one stage. Most of the money went to the centre-right RPR party founded by the present president, Jacques Chirac, until the socialist Francois Mitterrand, soon after his presidential election in 1982, demanded that the spoils be evenly spread. In their 1,045-page indictment and a further 44,000 pages of documents, the investigating magistrates described in detail "a large number of operations carried out on the margins of normal functioning of the group's structures, and destined to collect assets off the books."
In addition to jail terms totaling 60 years, the public prosecutors sought a record 34.5 million euros in fines against the 37 defendants, who included business associates of the company and executives' relatives accused of having benefited from the illegal largesse. Among those sentenced was Le Floch's former wife, Fatima Belaid, found guilty of receiving 4.6 million euros from Elf in exchange for her silence over the company's underhand dealings after the couple agreed to divorce. She was sentenced to three years in prison, of which two were suspended, and fined 1 million euros.
Many of the missing millions were paid out in illegal "royalties" to various African leaders and their families. Tarallo told the court that annual cash transfers totaling about US$16.7 million were made to Gabon's President Omar Bongo, while other huge sums were paid to leaders in Angola, Cameroun and Congo-Brazzaville. The payments were partly aimed at guaranteeing that it was Elf and not US or British firms that pumped the oil, but also to ensure the African leaders' allegiance to France. In Gabon, Elf was a veritable state within a state. France accounts for three-quarters of foreign investment in Gabon, and Gabon sometimes provided 75 percent of Elf's profits. In return for protection and sweeteners from Elf, France used the state as a base for military and espionage activities in west Africa. |
