Treasure Islands - Nicholas Shaxson [4]
The system was a kind of open secret: A few well-connected French insiders knew all about it, and a fair number of educated outsiders in France knew something important was afoot but didn’t know the details and largely ignored it. Yet almost nobody could see the whole thing in overview. Everything was connected through tax havens. The paper trails, as the magistrates were discovering during my Libreville trip, were typically sliced among Gabon, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Jersey, and beyond. Joly admitted that even though she probed deeply she only ever saw fragments of the whole picture. “Endless leads were lost in the shifting sands of the tax havens. The personal accounts of monarchs, elected presidents-for-life, and dictators were being protected from the curiosity of the magistrates.”5
My trip to Gabon in late 1997 came at an exquisitely sensitive time. On November 7 of that year, less than a week after I left Libreville, Christine Deviers-Joncour, a former lingerie model, was sent to jail in the southern suburbs of Paris, still protecting the secrets of her lover Roland Dumas, the French foreign minister. She was jailed for suspected fraud after magistrates found that Elf had paid her over $6 million to help “persuade” Dumas, a haughty prince of the Paris political clans, to do certain things—notably to reverse his public opposition to the sale of Thomson missile boats to Taiwan. On an Elf credit card she had bought him gifts, including a pair of hand-made ankle boots from a Paris shop so exclusive that its owner offered to wash customers’ shoes once a year in champagne. Nobody thanked her for her discretion, and five and a half months in jail gave her time to reflect on her treatment. “A flower, a single flower, even sent to me anonymously [in jail] would have been enough,” she later explained.6 “I would have known it came from Roland.” The following year she cast aside the code of silence and published a book, The Whore of the Republic, which became a best seller in France.
So when I visited Gabon at that especially tricky moment, the Elf networks must have wondered why this English journalist was nosing around in Libreville. Was I really a journalist? No wonder Mr. Autogue took such an interest in me. Recently, I tried to find him, to ask him about our week together. His old phone numbers no longer work, several Africa experts in Paris hadn’t heard of him, Internet searches turned up no trace of him or the company he claimed to represent, and the only person with that name in the French phone book has, a surprised-sounding wife in a rural Dordogne village informed me, never been to Gabon.
The Elf system, when I visited, was dying. The magistrates’ investigations were in full swing, and they finally secured 31 convictions in November 2004 after eight years’ work. Elf Aquitaine has since been privatized and is now part of the Total group, which has an utterly different character from the old Elf. Still, Elf was not the