Last week, a Maltese politician dropped a bombshell into the investigation of allegations of kickbacks in the sale of French submarines to Malaysia, saying French prosecutors were on the trail of a soft-spoken Frenchman named Jean-Marie Boivin and his Malta-based company, Gifen.

Boivin ( right ), according to a plethora of news stories in France and Luxembourg, is at the heart of a scandal that stretches across half the earth to Pakistan, Taiwan, Malaysia, India and untold numbers of other countries whose defence ministries bought armaments from the French defence giant DCNS around the turn of the century.

At least three of those sales have been dogged with stories of bribery and the murder or unexplained deaths of 19 people...