On one woman�s fight for truth

Eva Joly first knew what she was getting into when a witness with whom she had just conducted a hearing walked back into her room and put his finger to his lips.

The man was an engineer with the French state-owned oil company Elf, which the Norwegian-born French magistrate was investigating. He took a sheet of paper from her desk and scribbled on it: "Look out, I've seen Elf's people on the pavement outside."

The man looked at her for a few seconds and left again. Joly realised that he was communicating to her that her office in the heart of the French justice system was not secure and was under surveillance.

Another magistrate might have quietly decided to let the matter drop, but not Joly. As she said in a book about the whole Elf investigation, recently translated into English: "There could be no question of letting myself be intimidated. If I was now a worry to them, I would become a real danger."

Her investigation would reveal one of the biggest financial scandals to hit France. Over six years, the inquiry she led discovered that millions of euros had been siphoned off to pay for executives' luxurious lifestyles and in bribes.

What started as a file passed to her by the Commissions des Operations de Bourse - the national agency that regulatesstockmarketactivityin France - ballooned into a major investigation. Originally, it focused on Maurice Biderman, the head of a clothing and textilecompanythathadbeen involved in a bitter legal dispute with a Biderman associate in the US.

The case soon discovered funds that had been channelled to Biderman by subsidiaries of Elf Aquitaine, a French state-owned oil company.

Theinvestigationspreadto include Andre Tarallo, an Elf executive, nicknamed "Mr Africa", who managed a host of secret payments or "commissions" that Elf paid out to many for contracts, particularly in Africa.

Theinvestigationandthe skeins of the scandal began to spread and more and more influentialnamesfromthe worlds of business, politics and elsewhere in the French establishment became enmeshed in it.

As Joly said: "I had no idea of the extent of the corruption; I'd assumed that people in general respected the laws. But reality outstripped fiction. There was an ocean of fraud at the highestlevel.EverydayIfound something new."

LittlewonderthenthatJoly received further threats as she continued her work, including discovering a card on her office door carrying her name along with those of every other French magistrate killed since the second world war. Every name on the card was crossed outside, except her own.

Another time, she and several policemen raided the home of a seniorpolicemanimplicatedinthe scandal and discovered a handgun had been left on a table, pointed at the door. The gun was loaded. The policeman insisted afterwards that he had simply forgotten it was there.

Butthemostchillingthreat occurred when Joly was called in by thechief presiding judgeofthe appealcourt,ahighlyunusual event. He told her that he wanted to giver her a "simple piece of advice as a friend: I have it from an extremely reliable source that you have now entered into an extremely dangerous area. Do not go near the windows."

Butwhiletheinvestigation attracted increasing public attention, it did not reach frenzy level until Joly focused on Roland Dumas, a former foreignsecretaryintheFrancois Mitterand government. Dumas was headofFrance'sConstitutional Council, a post which is ranked fifth highest in France.

Joly discovered the existence of a £1 million luxury apartment in Paris and £4300 monthly payments allotted to Dumas's mistress, Christine Deviers-Joncour, who had been on the Elf payroll for unspecified duties.

Joly would jail Deviers-Joncour for a year to get her to talk, with the Dumas mistress eventually setting out her version of events in a sensationalbook:TheWhoreofthe Republic.

Joly eventually became worn down by the case and the reaction to it, and her personal unpopularity, and accepted an invitation to become an adviser to the Norwegian government where she continues to campaign and use her experience to work on issues such as toughening the international authorities' actions against money laundering and the like.

She said in a recent interview with BBC Radio 4: "I was very tired and I think it had cost me a lot. I think the lessons of this case have not been learned."

Those lessons, Joly argues in her book, include the assertion that these examples of corruption are not one-offs but have in fact become a system in themselves, a system that needs to be dismantled.

She writes: "In the eyes of history, our generation will bear the responsibility for having let fatal germs develop in the wake of democracy. The spread of corruption is in effect the other side of the coin in a market society where money tends to become the sole criterion to be considered and the only objective for individuals."

It is in this light that Joly so heavily criticised the British government for abandoningtheSeriousFraud Office's inquiry into BAE Systems defence deals with Saudi Arabia.

It is a remarkable book, written with passion and often in striking prose.

You do not have to agree with everything Eva Joly argues to be impressed by her and the work she has done in battling corruption.

Justice Under Siege: One Woman's Battle Against a European Oil Giant is published by Arcadia Books, priced £16.99