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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Srexley who wrote (391063)	4/12/2003 8:03:09 PM
From: JEB	Respond to of 769670

Elf 'paid Bongo secret cash for exile' PARIS, April 9 (AFP) - President Omar Bongo of Gabon used secret payments from the French company Elf in the early 1990s to set up offshore bank accounts as insurance against his possible fall from power, the oil group's former head of Africa operations said in court Wednesday. "President Bongo was asking himself at the time if he would hold on to power. He feared he might be purely and simply forced to leave the country," Andre Tarallo said during a major embezzlement trial that began in Paris four weeks ago. "That was how the idea came to set up a kind of savings account in case of a mishap. And so the decision was taken by President Bongo to ask me to create as discreetly as possible accounts which I was to manage but which were his property," he said. Tarallo, 75, who was known as Elf's "Mr Africa" for his network of contacts on the continent, is one of 37 people charged with personally benefitting from the formerly state-owned company's massive system of commissions and influence-buying. Accused of using Swiss accounts to buy a luxury villa in the Mediterranean island of Corsica and a Paris apartment using money from the accounts, Tarallo has always insisted the funds belonged to Bongo. In previous testimony the former two top executives of the company, Loik Le Floch-Prigent, 59, and Alfred Sirven, 76, have both admitted that millions of euros were spent from Elf's secret funds to finance French political parties and personalities. In a book published two years ago entitled "Omar Bongo: Blanc comme Negre" (White like Negro), Bongo told journalist Airy Routier he had been duped by Tarallo into signing letters that gave him title to the bank accounts. "I thought the letters would remain confidential and that they would be useful to keep him (Tarallo) out of prison. I never thought he would threaten to use them against me. That he would try to make me confess," Bongo said. The Elf trial - one of the biggest criminal cases in recent French history - is set to last till July, with a verdict later in the year. expatica.com