PARIS, Dec 21 — A French court today fined oil giant Total €500,000 (RM2.38 million) for corruption after finding it guilty of paying bribes while bidding for a huge gas contract in Iran in 1997.

The French company was accused of paying US$30 million in bribes to middlemen, in return for help in securing the rights to the South Pars natural gas field, the world’s largest.

In 2013, Total paid US$398 million in the US to settle similar charges arising in that country out of the joint French-US investigation.

The French part of the probe, which was launched back in 2006, initially covered both the 1997 South Pars deal, worth US$2 billion, and the 1995 concession for the Sirri A and E oil fields.

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Total was suspected of paying a total of US$60 million in bribes between 1995 and 2004.

But in the end the multinational was only tried for the US$30 million it paid in connection with South Pars after 2000, when a new French law on “corruption of foreign public officials” came into effect.

While convicting the company the court rejected prosecutors’ call for it to seize €250 million in assets — investigators’ estimate of the value of the proceeds of the corruption.

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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. — AFP