February 15, 2019
A French court has fined oil giant Total 500,000 euros ($575,000) for corruption for paying bribes to Iranian officials to secure its huge South Pars gasfield contract in 1997.
The French company was accused of paying $30 million in bribes to Mehdi Hashemi, son of then President Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, a senior energy official at the time, along with two other Iranians.
The Paris court, however, dismissed prosecutors’ request to seize 250 million euros in Total assets, which was what investigators estimated was the value of the proceeds of the corruption.
The fine represents a fraction of the $398 million that Total paid in the US in 2013 to settle similar charges arising out of the joint French-US investigation.
By admitting responsibility in the US, Total avoided the embarrassment of a trial for violations of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which seeks to stop bribery in foreign countries by companies with a significant US presence.
The company cited its deal with US authorities in refusing to answer questions about its Iran dealings at its Paris trial.
The French part of the probe, which was launched in 2006, initially covered both the 1997 South Pars deal, worth $2 billion, and the 1995 concession for the Sirri A and E oilfields.
Total was accused of paying a total of $60 million in bribes between 1995 and 2004 to obtain the three contracts.
The US Justice Department said that Total attempted to pass off the payments as “business development expenses.”
In the end, the multinational was tried only over the $30 million it paid in connection with the South Pars field after 2000, when a new French law on “corruption of foreign public officials” came into effect.
Total’s late CEO Christophe de Margerie, who was head of Middle East exploration at the time of the payments, was also being investigated before his sudden death in a plane crash in Moscow in 2014.
In a statement after the court decision December 21, Total’s current CEO, Patrick Pouyanne, said anyone who knew de Margerie “knows that he would never be involved in any type of corruption.”
An Iranian businessman, Bijan Dadfar, and an oil industry consultant, Abbas Yazdi, were also named in the case.
Dadfar has died since the probe began while Yazdi, who is also believed to be dead, was sentenced to four years imprisonment in the absence of any death certificate.