With his lady friend in jail, Roland Dumas could be the next target in a high-profile corruption investigation underway in Paris

By THOMAS SANCTON /PARIS

y any measure, Roland Dumas has had a brilliant career. The silver-haired lawyer, art collector and bon vivant was one of the closest friends and political allies of the late President Francois Mitterrand. Mitterrand twice named him Foreign Minister and, as he prepared to leave the Elysee in May 1995, appointed Dumas to a nine-year term as president of the Constitutional Council, roughly equivalent to France's Supreme Court. But the glitter is dimming for the 75-year-old Dumas: as he lay in a hospital near Bordeaux last week following intestinal surgery, he faced an almost certain corruption indictment once his health permits him to meet Paris investigating magistrates Eva Joly and Laurence Vichnievsky.

For the past year, the two judges have been looking into exorbitant commissions paid by the then state-owned oil company Elf in conjunction with the $3 billion sale of six French frigates to the government of Taiwan. Officially, Elf had no involvement in the sale of the frigates, which were built by the state-owned industrial conglomerate Thomson. But an investigation into Thomson's complaints of unjustified commissions soon turned up a femme fatale who admitted she had been paid some $10 million by Elf to promote the sale. Christine Deviers-Joncour, 51, a sultry, high-living brunette, told the magistrates that her mission had been to convince Dumas, then Foreign Minister, to reverse his opposition to the sale on the grounds that it would harm Franco-Chinese relations.

It did not help matters for Dumas that Deviers-Joncour was an intimate friend of his, that he had intervened to get her a $120,000-a-year sinecure at Elf in 1990, and had accepted from Deviers-Joncour a $2,000 pair of hand-made shoes paid for by an Elf credit card. (Dumas says he reimbursed the amount.) Whether Deviers-Joncour and Elf were also the source of the millions Dumas deposited in his personal bank accounts from 1991 to 1995 is what the magistrates are now seeking to find out.

Dumas adamantly denies all the allegations. In an interview with Le Figaro this month, he declared that he "never received a cent" from the Taiwan contract, and had never wavered in his opposition to the sale. The decision to authorize the deal, he claimed, was made by Mitterrand and then Prime Minister Michel Rocard. Dumas added that some $500 million in commissions had been paid to unnamed beneficiaries with Mitterrand's consent. Last week, Taipei announced a freeze on the final $45 million payment until these allegations have been cleared up.

Elf became involved in the Taiwan deal after its former director of human resources, Alfred Sirven, offered to put the company's network of lobbyists at Thomson's disposal. A Hong Kong-born American, Edmond Kwan, was given the task of unblocking the situation through his Asian contacts for a fee of some $30 million. But Thomson ultimately did the deal through two Taiwanese intermediaries and refused to pay Kwan's commission. Ordered by a Geneva court to honor the original agreement, Thomson launched a legal counteraction in February 1997 that prompted the current investigation.

Last November, the magistrates jailed Deviers-Joncour during investigation of allegations that she fraudulently accepted fictitious employment and unjustified payments from Elf. In addition to her commissions and salary, investigators have determined Deviers-Joncour used her Elf credit card to the tune of some $40,000 a month. In 1992, she purchased a $3 million apartment on Paris' fashionable Rue de Lille. Dumas is suspected of (but denies) helping set up the company through which the apartment was purchased. Gilbert Miara, a businessman who helped Deviers-Joncour to buy and furnish the apartment, has also been charged in the case, as has former Elf president Loik Le Floch-Prigent.

But it is far from certain that the magistrates will net Roland Dumas himself. Whatever the circumstantial evidence against him, judicial insiders say, the hard evidence at this point is weak; his eye-popping bank deposits could have come, as he says, from the sale of artworks and other personal sources.

Nevertheless, in a bid to sidestep the two determined magistrates, Dumas has petitioned to have his case transferred to the Court of Justice, a special tribunal for government officials, on the grounds that he was a sitting minister at the time of his involvement in the Taiwan sale. Barring that change of jurisdiction, Dumas is likely to be put under formal investigation when he sees the judges early next month. At that point, guilty or not, he would almost certainly have to resign from the plum judicial post that was Mitterrand's parting gift.