Former minister is investigated

France's most outrageous corruption scandal moved closer to resolution yesterday when the former foreign minister and head of the Constitutional Council, Mr Roland Dumas, was formally placed under investigation on suspicion of complicity and possession of misappropriated company funds: in other words, fraud.

Mr Dumas's downfall is a case of cherchez la femme. The woman is Mrs Christine Deviers-Joncour, one of Mr Dumas's mistresses during his 1988-1993 stint as foreign minister.

In 1989 he persuaded the state-owned oil company Elf Acquitaine to hire Mrs Deviers-Joncour at a monthly salary of Ffr50,000 (£6,024). Her sole responsibility was to lobby her lover, Mr Dumas, to approve a Ffr2.5 billion (£301 million) sale of six French frigates to the Taiwanese navy.

Conscientious foreign minister that he was, Mr Dumas originally opposed the sale on the grounds that it would damage France's relations with China.

Mrs Deviers-Joncour received at least Ffr59 million (£7.1 million) from Elf. Mr Dumas claims he did not profit from her "employment" there, although he received a pair of custom-made Italian shoes costing Ffr11,000 (£1,325) and paid for with Mrs Deviers-Joncour's corporate Elf credit card.

Judges Eva Joly and Laurence Vichnievsky, who travelled to Mr Dumas's country home near Bordeaux to give him the bad news, would also like to know where Ffr14 million (£1.68 million), deposited in his bank accounts in the early 1990s, came from.

In French law, the mise en examen falls short of formal charges. But politicians in the centre-right RPR yesterday demanded Mr Dumas's resignation from the Constitutional Council to save the credibility of the institution.

President Jacques Chirac, who has stressed that the presumption of innocence must be respected, is again at odds with his own party.

As head of the Constitutional Council, Mr Dumas is the fifth-ranking person in the French Republic, and France's highest judicial figure. He has one month to post a Ffr5 million (£602,409) bond, must report his movements and is banned from visiting tax havens such as Switzerland and Luxembourg.

He has contested the jurisdiction of Judges Joly and Vichnievsky, who have been investigating corruption at Elf for the past 18 months.

Apparently believing that people of the same class understand one another, Mr Dumas demands that his case be entrusted to the plodding Court of Justice of the Republic, established to try senior government officials.