Sirven contacts deny wrongdoing

Some politicians in Sirven's address book have disowned him

PARIS, France -- French politicians have been defending their reputations after being identified in the private address book of former Elf executive Alfred Sirven.

Sirven, whose contact book contents have been published in French journals, is alleged to have showered the powerful elite with bribes and favours.

He was arrested in the Philippines last week and brought before a Paris court on Wednesday to face charges of fraud and influence-peddling.

His lawyer said he would file theft charges because the contacts book had been taken from his home.

On Thursday former cabinet ministers, deputies and aides took to the airwaves and issued statements denying they knew him or explaining how normal their contacts were with the man at the centre of France's biggest sleaze scandal in years.

The mere fact of being among the 200 names was not in itself evidence of any shady business with Sirven, who as number two at the state-owned Elf oil firm allegedly ran a huge slush fund to influence politics and business around the world.

But the fascination in France for the "carnet d'adresses" (address book) -- the popular term for the whole network of private contacts someone might have -- ensured that suspicion would linger over any name on the list.

"I had no contact with Mr Sirven," former foreign minister Herve de Charette told Europe 1 radio, explaining that his only links to Elf were to its charitable foundation that helped finance a festival in the town where he is mayor.

Francois d'Aubert, a liberal deputy from Mayenne, said his name figured on the list because he had known Sirven in the early 1980s when he was staff manager at a factory in the area.

"When I knew him, Mr Sirven was an honourable person, someone lots of people had contacts with," he said.

"I have never benefited from phantom jobs, credit cards, Swiss bank accounts or professional contacts with Elf and its subsidiaries and managers," he said, listing some of the elements that figure among Sirven's alleged methods.

The glossy weekly Paris-Match reproduced whole pages of the dog-eared directory and a mysterious page tucked inside full of initials and mobile telephone numbers that police suspect Sirven, 74, used to keep in touch during his three-year exile.

A lawyer for Jean-Christophe Mitterrand, the son of the late president Francois Mitterrand now being probed in a completely different scandal, said it was no surprise that his client's telephone number figured in the well-used directory.

Mitterrand was his father's African affairs aide from 1986 to 1993 while Sirven headed the international operations of Elf -- which was often used to advance French interests, especially in Africa -- from 1989 to 1993.

Sirven's contacts were so wide-ranging that Le Parisien, the newspaper which published the list on its Website on Wednesday, divided them into nine different categories to make the extent of his business activities clearer.

The categories ranged from the current Elf scandal, in which Sirven allegedly paid the lover of ex-foreign minister Roland Dumas to influence him, to his contacts with Socialist and conservative politicians and even a Communist trade unionist.

National Assembly speaker Raymond Forni denounced the publication of Sirven's phonebook as a media spectacle and said: "We have to clean things up here."

Reuters contributed to this report.

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Elf Aquitaine
French Justice Ministry
Paris Match

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