Somebody – political acquaintances, people at the foreign office at Quai d’Orsay, we’ll never know – somebody found him a fantastic Ivory Coast company specialising in cleaning the holds of ships, a company run by a completely moronic fall guy, whose shareholders are all ultra-corrupt dudes from customs and the port authority. After having paid off whoever was necessary, he signs a contract for the African-style retreatment of his waste for a ridiculous amount, with the fall guy not stopping for a single second to interrogate him about the nature of that waste. Thus, the businessman shifts his legal liability to the respectable fall guy and the slop is pumped off the ship in the direction of a flotilla of rusty tanker trucks that disperse to the four corners of the town. De Rigny, with the satisfaction that comes from a job well done, goes home, and the Russian heads off with an empty tanker back to the scrapyard.

Then, what was bound to happen, happens: the slop is poured out, as is, into the rubbish dumps of Abidjan. The black syrup burns several people to death, some of whom are children rummaging around in the scraps. As for the mercaptan, it seriously poisons more than one thousand locals and sets off a panic that increasingly resembles a civil war. But it’s not de Rigny’s fault; he has done nothing illegal. So, when Transparency International brings proceedings against him in personam and against his company Oilofina for the bribery of foreign public officials in order to try to repatriate the dispute surrounding this ecological disaster to France and thereby to avoid him settling by way of some baksheesh, cousin Philippe screams injustice and persecution.

The years roll past, the NGO evidently struggles to present proof of bribery and the matter which was brought in 2014 slides sluggishly towards dismissal. And because they have an accommodating memory in French Africa, de Rigny calmly resumes his petroleum business with Ivory Coast.

But a few months ago, out of nowhere, there’s a bolt from the blue: our African friends have all of a sudden grown resentful. For some obscure reason, Oilofina has fallen into disgrace and the powers that be have had Philippe’s son, Pierre-Alexandre, arrested on the tarmac where he was waiting for his private jet after signing agreements for his daddy in Abidjan. And given the number of his alarming letters addressed to the Quai d’Orsay, it didn’t seem like he was having much fun in the Maca prison where he was incarcerated.

Far from distracting me or sending me off to sleep, reading that file sent me into a blind rage.

I found it unacceptable, first of all, that one might ostentatiously consider one section of humankind to be worthless simply because they live in a poor and corrupt country.