The man who ran the state-owned French oil empire Elf said in court yesterday that millions of dollars were siphoned out of the company to pay for his divorce in the early 1990s.
Elf ex-chairman Loik Le Floch-Prigent said an acrimonious split with wife Fatima Belaid posed such a risk tothe company and its business interests that he went in person to see the late President Francois Mitterrand and offered to quit.
"Francois Mitterrand refused my resignation and said to sort the problem out ... I believed I was entitled to use Elf's secret funds to tackle two risks of collateral damage, Fatima's change of lodgings andthe price of silence."
It was the 14th day of a trial into the biggest graft scandal in French history, where 37 people, including Le Floch-Prigent, are in the dock over a web of corruption and embezzlement of $366.5 million.
