Now judges should soon be able to interrogate Mr Sirven himself, to determine whether and why he paid the elegant, Ms Deviers-Joncour, 53, and whether Mr Dumas knowingly and illegally benefitted from the fortune showered on her. Mr Sirven, who was sought under three different international arrest warrants, is charged with illegally using funds of a state-owned company to have Ms Deviers-Joncour convince Mr Dumas to approve the sale of six frigates to Taiwan, despite a French arms embargo on the island. Mr Dumas finally agreed to the deal in 1991, after long opposing it, as a provocation against China, but denies he did so under his lover's influence or because of any financial favours.

Judicial sources said the arrest of Mr Sirven, who was expected to be extradited to France over the weekend, would delay the Dumas trial. It was not immediately clear, who would benefit from his testimony, because it was not known what he would say. The prosecution in the Paris trial, contends that Mr Dumas helped his former mistress get a fictitious job, with the petroleum giant Elf, which paid her commissions from a 1991 sale of frigates to Taiwan, that she lobbied the minister to approve.

Mr Dumas denies the charges and Loik Le Floch-Prigent, who was head of Elf at the time, has denied knowing why Ms Deviers-Joncour was on the payroll of the then state-owned company. Mr Sirven, a wartime Resistance fighter from Toulouse, was second-in-command at Elf - which is now part of the privatised Total-FinaElf, and is believed to have controlled millions of francs in bribes that Elf paid abroad, for contracts and favours. As the head of Elf-Aquitaine International, a Swiss affiliate of Elf, he allegedly paid off parties of both right and left in France in the 1980s, when the lack of a party funding law, made slush fund financing a common practice. Among the list of people police charge with having received his largesse, were allies of the late Socialist President Francois Mitterrand and the conservative former Interior Minister Charles Pasqua. His name has also figured prominently in the mysterious case of 256 million franc-currency not found, that Elf allegedly paid in commissions, when it bought theLeuna oil refinery in eastern Germany in 1992.

Charges that the Christian Democratic party of former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl profited from the deal, which he and Mitterrand championed as a sign of French-German cooperation, have never been proven. Police put out an arrest warrant for Mr Sirven in 1997 but did not inform the police about him until December 1998, by which time he had fled France with a false passport.

He apparently moved about freely in the Philippines, aided by his Philippine companion and her influential family. He was so successful at escaping arrest, that the French policemen sent to Manila to coordinate the manhunt, suspected he was tipped off by friends in high places back home.

Mr Dumas was forced to resign as head of the Constitutional Council, France's top legal authority, over claims that his former mistress received hefty payments to lobby him to approve the sale. The mistress was a Sirven employee at the time.

(Reuters)