Oil man says Chirac knew of bribes

The former boss of the oil giant Elf, currently the focus in France of a vast corruption scandal, yesterday said that the payment of large covert commissions to foreign governments had been routine practice for French state-owned firms and was allowed by successive presidents.

In potentially explosive interviews with two newspapers, Loik Le Floch-Prigent, one of seven defendants including the former foreign minister, Roland Dumas, in the Elf sleaze trial, said he was fed up with being made the scapegoat for a culture of corruption that he alleged extended to the very top of the state.

Mr Le Floch-Prigent, who faces up to five years in prison on charges of presiding over Elf's estimated £300m slush fund, accused the political establishment of hypocrisy in failing to acknowledge its key role in a massive system of illicit payments aimed at securing Elf's interests in Africa, Spain and Germany.

"A large number of people at the heart of the government were aware of the sums at stake," he told Le Figaro. "All the presidents knew. Jacques Chirac knows. Once a year, the president of Elf goes to the Elysée with a chart recording the commissions for the year. It represents several hundreds of millions of francs."

The scandal centres on allegations that the late president François Mitterrand's close friend, Mr Dumas, benefited from commissions paid by Elf in a £1.6bn contract for the sale of frigates to Taiwan.