TEHRAN, March 24, 2007 (AFP) - The son of a former president of Iran denied on Saturday suggestions he might have been involved in bribes allegedly paid by French oil giant Total for an Iranian gas contract 10 years ago.

Mehdi Hashemi Rafsanjani told AFP: "I deny these accusations, which are totally false. There is no link between me and Total."

Rafsanjani is the son of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was president of Iran from 1989-1997. He himself was a director general of the National Iranian Oil Co (NIOC) at the time of the case in question.

His name resurfaced on Friday in an investigation of Total's chief executive, Christophe de Margerie, who is facing corruption charges over alleged bribes paid for an Iranian gas contract in 1997.

Sources close to the matter indicated that Mehdi Hashemi Rafsanjani's secretary, a Swiss resident who allegedly holds a bank account in Switzerland containing suspect funds, was believed to be the middleman in that case.

Investigators are interested in two Swiss accounts into which payments of nearly 100 million Swiss francs (60 million euros, 80 million dollars) were paid.

Margerie, who rose to Total's top position last month, was the group's Middle East director when the 1997 contract was signed.

The younger Rafsanjani said on Saturday: "I have no secretary living in Switzerland," and added that he would sue those who "have defamed me."

He was implicated in an earlier corruption case involving Norwegian oil giant Statoil.

In 2004, Statoil was slapped with a fine of 20 million kroner (at the time worth 2.4 million euros, 2.97 million dollars) for having engaged in attempted corruption in an Iranian oil deal.

At the heart of the matter was a 15.2-million-dollar (11.4-million-euro) Statoil contract signed in June 2002 with a London-based consultancy Horton Investments.

Norwegian investigators suspected that the consultancy was a front company and the contract was in fact a bribe to then NIOC boss Mehdi Hashemi Rafsanjani aimed at facilitating Statoil's access to Iranian oil reserves.

Statoil, which has always denied the corruption charges, terminated its contract with Horton Investments in 2003 after Norwegian media got wind of the affair.

sgh/al/gk

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