Series »Eldorado« | The sniffer planes

Pretty much all of the characters in “Eldorado” are blinded by enthusiasm. Photo: Arte.

It was too good to be true, but those in charge of the oil industry simply had to believe the fairy tale at the time. In 1976, in the midst of the oil crisis, a Belgian nobleman and an Italian scientist sold the state-owned French oil company Elf-Aquitaine a method that could be used to detect oil fields from an airplane. But the so-called sniffer planes were a fraud; 900 million francs went from the tax coffers directly into the pockets of sophisticated fraudsters within three years.

This scandal, which was long covered up and only came to light in the 1980s through an almost concealed Court of Auditors report, is the template for the French-Belgian series "Eldorado", which, however, offers less of a historically meticulous analysis than uses the material to tell stories about work hierarchies, faith in technology, the pressure of big money and the panic over energy security. It is precisely the last point that makes this story from the 1970s so fascinating from today's perspective, because it shows how those responsible in politics and economics react blindly to supposed constraints.

“Eldorado” uses historical material to tell the story of work hierarchies, faith in technology and the panic surrounding energy security.

In the fiction, the two fraudsters, the heavily indebted nobleman Arnaud de Toledo (Jeremie Renier) and the supposed physicist Florindo Bonamici (Laurent Capulleto), are two soldiers of fortune who actually want to develop a process to find water veins in countries in the global south. Until the oil industry takes notice of her and a lawyer persuades her to make her skills available to the economy and to postpone humanistic projects until later.

»Eldorado« is an excellently crafted series that tells this story in images that are almost cinematic. The six-part series captures in a pointed and exciting way the dynamics of the supposed success to which both those responsible in the state-owned industrial group and the two providers of the process succumb. Do either of the two oil field explorers realize that their machine called Omega cannot measure anything, or are their actions driven by an enthusiasm for their own project that ignores their lack of scientific competence?

The people on the boardroom at Elf-Aquitaine, where the son-in-law of the CEO, Leo Sarda, is also supervising the project, are also blind to the company because of their enthusiasm. For his great portrayal of the opportunistic executive who ends up being the scapegoat, Karim Leklou received the award for best acting performance at this year's series festival in Lille.

In the fiction, it is the young geologist Emma Zenatti (Marie Colomb) who, like in the crime thriller, tracks down the fraudsters and, with the help of Arnaud's daughter, convicts them. This happens just as President Giscard d'Estaing wants to inspect the miracle machine. The measurement documents that were just treated like the holy grail end up in the shredder in no time. A lot of staff is suddenly furloughed, apparently no one knew anything about it.

A final parliamentary investigation in the 1980s, when the Socialists were in power, was supposed to shed light on the affair, but it didn't really succeed. Arnaud de Toledo, the failed do-gooder with shoulder-length hair at the head of this incredible fraud scandal, disappears at the end and it's not even clear whether he might have been cornered by the oil industry, which is fighting very hard. Some of the money paid to the fraudsters was recovered, but a considerable amount was lost or was swallowed up by countless flights and fruitless test drillings, which often required entire areas of forest to be cleared.

In reality, the scandal was almost more absurd than in fiction, as there was an entire fleet of aircraft that regularly carried out ground surveys from the air. In the series, Arnaud's company is a small five-man operation with one airplane. The processing also took place after a delay of several years. Despite the enormous costs, the whole process was kept a top secret, which also had to do with the French government's hope of being able to use the technology for military purposes. When the fraud was discovered, everyone involved wanted to quickly sweep the affair under the table. That's why there were no criminal prosecutions of the fraudsters.

The absurdity of the process is well illustrated in a scene in the series. The company's own scientists turn to management and explain that the miracle machine's measurements must be nonsense. But these objections are dismissed with the succinct remark that scientists simply cannot understand the new technology. The series, which is worth watching, tells us in a great way what triggers the longing for a simple and efficient technological solution that generates maximum profit and what results this can bring.

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