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French Elite on Trial

The Sordid Tale of 'Angolagate'

By Stefan Simons in Paris

Corruption, arms sales and a civil war in Africa: France's biggest ever bribery scandal sees 42 leading figures of the French business and political world on trial. They are accused of being involved in a murky network said to have facilitated the illegal transport of arms to Angola in the 1990s.

The story, the actors and the exclusive scenery are the stuff of movies. The cast includes former cabinet ministers, billionaires, financial experts and glamorous celebrities. In other words, a who's who of Paris society. And then there are the requisite chauffeurs, hostesses and a motley collection of characters from the French capital's demimonde.

The action takes place in an inconspicuous luxury home in Paris, on luxury yachts and on board private jets. It revolves around astronomical amounts of cash, in francs and dollars, and a murky network of fictitious companies, offshore bank accounts and people operating under false names. The story is about intrigues, dodges, political maneuvers and the independence of the judiciary system in the face of government pressure. And above all, it's about weapons sales -- to Angola.

The 468-page indictment that attempts to disentangle a shady business deal worth billions may not be a Hollywood script, but it proves that reality can sometimes be far more exciting than any fiction.

It is based on evidence from 150 files, the results of a decade of detailed work by police, prosecutors and investigative judges. It accuses the country's elites of having behaved like unprincipled and greedy war profiteers.

The scandal, known as "Angolagate," goes back 10 years to when the illegal weapons deals were first revealed. Last week 42 defendants in the case finally went on trial before the 11th Criminal Court in Paris. The trappings of the trial are in keeping with its high-profile cast. The defendants sitting in the "Salle des criées," beneath elaborate ceiling murals and chandeliers in the Palace of Justice on the Ile de la Cité, include Jean-Christopher Mitterrand, the 61-year-old son of former President Francois Mitterrand, former Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, 81, and Jacques Attali, 64, a former advisor to Mitterrand who until recently worked for President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The leading role is played by Pierre Falcone, 54, who, according to the prosecution, was the mastermind behind the illegal weapons trade. Co-defendant Arkadi Gaydamak, 56, is currently hoping to embark on a second career as mayor of Jerusalem. He opted to remain in Israel.

A Bitter Proxy War

The illustrious defendants face charges that include illegal arms sales, tax evasion and money laundering. The indictment mentions active bribery, embezzlement of assets and the unlawful acceptance of benefits. The defendants, if found guilty, could face huge fines and up to 10 years in prison.

It takes a step back in time to understand the prosecution's case. The history leading up to the trial goes back to 1993, to the era of political cohabitation when President François Mitterrand, a socialist, dictated the tenets of French foreign policy, while Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, a conservative, ran the government.

By the mid-1990s a bloody, protracted conflict was raging in Angola, a former Portuguese colony, between the troops of President José Eduardo Dos Santos and the forces commanded by his archenemy, Jonas Savimbi, the leader of the anti-communist rebel group UNITA. It was a bitter proxy war in which Dos Santos' Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) was backed by Cuba and Russia, while Savimbi counted on the support of the United States and the Apartheid regime in South Africa.

The United Nations advocated a peaceful solution of the conflict and demanded an arms embargo, a course that France supported. When former Marxist Dos Santos came under military pressure and needed more weapons for his troops, he turned to the French for assistance. The response from the French Foreign Ministry on Quai d'Orsay in Paris was that it could not export weapons to a crisis region.

Dos Santos, becoming desperate, turned to his acquaintance Jean-Bernard Curial, the French Socialist Party's expert on Africa. "France must help us; Mitterrand must send us weapons," Dos Santos told Curial, a military opponent of Apartheid who today runs a small publishing company in the Latin Quarter.

It was no easy task. Nevertheless, according to the prosecution, Curial found a supporter in Jean-Christopher Mitterrand, the president's eldest son. Known as "Monsieur Afrique," the younger Mitterrand had served in his father's administration, from 1986 to 1992, as a special envoy to Africa. Mitterrand junior, mocked in Africa as "Papa-m'a-dit" (Papa-told-me-so), because his diplomatic expertise was more or less limited to his good relationship with his father, had the right connections. The helpful son of the president put Curial in touch with French businessman Pierre Falcone.

The jet-setting Falcone, the key figure in the affair, had his own useful connections, having arranged weapons sales in the past as an advisor to the French government. Today he runs a string of companies stretching from China to South America, is married to a Bolivian former beauty queen and owns property in Phoenix, Arizona. Even in the 1990s, Falcone was a flamboyant party animal, a generous host and a talented dealmaker.

Falcone knew just the right man to handle the discreet shipment of military equipment. Gaydamak, a native Russian and former colonel in the KGB, emigrated to Israel in 1972 and later moved to France. When the Warsaw Pact collapsed, he used his excellent relationships with the former Soviet military elite to go on a shopping spree in the military warehouses of Russia and its allies. The post-Cold War transitional period was wild and rife with bargains.