French Justice Chief Quits in Scandal

Facing criminal charges along with his former lover in one of the juiciest scandals in recent French history, Roland Dumas, the president of the country’s top legal body, said Wednesday that he has resigned after battling for nearly a year to keep his job.

In U.S. terms, it was like the chief justice of the Supreme Court quitting to be tried on charges of embezzlement.

For the French, the trial later this year of the 77-year-old Dumas, a former Cabinet minister, will be a watershed in efforts to make top government officials more accountable for their actions in office.

The silver-haired, debonair Dumas, is accused of helping his then-mistress get a job in l989 as a consultant with Elf Aquitaine, a large oil company then owned by the government, and reaping the benefits of her generous pay.

In a book written subsequently, Christine Deviers-Joncour, 52, said she pocketed nearly $10 million in Elf commissions for services that to an outside observer might seem trifling.

According to magistrates who investigated the case, Dumas benefited directly when Deviers-Joncour offered him the use of a luxury apartment on Paris’ Left Bank and gave him expensive presents bought with Elf’s money, including a $1,600 pair of shoes, a painting and a set of Greek statues worth more than $45,000.

Under investigation for more than two years, Dumas, who denies any wrongdoing, took leave without pay from the Constitutional Council last March. But after judges ordered Dumas and Deviers-Joncour on Feb. 18 to stand trial, his position looked untenable.

The Constitutional Council, whose nine members are named by the French president and the speakers of the two houses of Parliament, is the supreme arbiter of whether laws conform to France’s 1958 constitution. Most politicians from the left and right had refrained from publicly calling on Dumas to resign but voiced fears that his continued presence on the council was harming its reputation.

According to Le Monde, the most authoritative of Paris newspapers, the other council members last week threatened to remove Dumas by a formal vote if he didn’t go voluntarily.

In interviews with news services Wednesday, Dumas said he has quit as both president and member of the council. “I’m resigning from everything,” he told Reuters.

It was the first time a member of the Constitutional Council has given up his post because of pending criminal charges.

President Jacques Chirac swiftly named Yves Guena, Dumas’ deputy and a member of Chirac’s neo-Gaullist Rally for the Republic party, as replacement head of the council, Chirac’s office said.

Dumas’ judicial woes may be far from over. In a separate investigation, magistrates are looking into whether he abused his position as Mitterrand’s foreign minister to push through the sale of six French-built frigates to Taiwan.

Dumas originally had opposed the deal because of the complications it would cause in France’s relations with China. In her book, “The Whore of the Republic,” Deviers-Joncour says that Elf paid her well because of her connection to Dumas and that one specific task became winning his approval for the $2.7-billion sale of the warships--a deal with which Elf was involved.

In 1991, for whatever reason, Dumas changed his mind and the sale went through; Deviers-Joncour received $7 million in commissions paid via an Elf subsidiary in Switzerland.