The nine frozen French accounts hold over four million euros, said Jean-Philippe Le Bail, who is representing a French plaintiff who paid Bongo 457,347 euros (USD$583,454) to free his father from prison.

In 1996, Rene Cardona was imprisoned after a business dispute with Bongo, to whom he had sold a fishing and shipping firm. The businessman was released after his son paid money into Bongo's personal account, the court was told according to the Agence France Press.

Cardona's son made a complaint to the French authorities and in September 2008 a court in the South western city of Bordeaux ruled the payment had been illegal and ordered that Bongo repay the entire sum plus interest and legal costs.

The verdict

The verdict was confirmed at appeal on Monday, February 28 and Le Bail told the press that by his calculation the sum now due adds up to more than one million euros. "This concerns Credit Lyonnais, in which Omar Bongo has two current accounts, two savings accounts and a share account, and BNP, in which he has two checking accounts, a savings account and a share account," he said. "In the accounts as a whole there is a little over four million euros, not taking into account transactions that are currently underway," he added.

A lawyer representing Omar Bongo said in a press statement that the case was a private dispute, adding that a Libreville commercial court had sentenced the Frenchman to pay Bongo 900,000 euros in damages. "This is a business disagreement between two private individuals who have known each other for years," lawyer Francois Meyer told journalists.

Cardona, 75, said he bore no ill-feelings towards Bongo over his 48 days in a West African jail at the centre of a deadly Ebola outbreak. "I always had good relations with President Bongo, whom I have known for more than four decades and whom I still have a lot of respect for. But I believe he has been badly counselled," he told the press.

In recent years, President Bongo has had murky economic ties with France and French figures have complicated his relations with Paris and have become the subject of a legal challenge by anti-corruption activists.

Recently, a French police investigation, reportedly established that Bongo and his family own at least 33 luxury properties in France, including a villa in Paris bought in 2007 for 18.8 million euros.

In January 2009, French Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner was embarrassed when it was revealed that Bongo's government paid consultancy firms 2.64 million euros for advice on health policy drawn up by Kouchner before he took office. President Bongo has ruled his oil-rich but socially impoverished former French colony since 1967 and has been a close associate of a string of French leaders.