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PARIS: Official Pakistani documents detailing how President Asif Ali Zardari allegedly benefited from secret payments connected to the sale of French submarines to Pakistan have been seized as evidence by a magistrate investigating a suspected scam surrounding the deal.
The documents, revealed here for the first time by a leading French website, Mediapart, allege that the payments to Mr Zardari and others were connected to the sale of three Agosta class submarines by French defence contractor DCN to Pakistan in the 1990s.
The deal and the commissions associated with it are at the core of what has become known here as the ‘Karachi affair’, currently the subject of two judicial investigations and which has rocked the political establishment with its potential far-reaching ramifications.
A key allegation in the affair is that the cancellation of commissions to be paid out was behind a suicide bomb attack in Karachi on May 8, 2002, that left 11 French engineers dead. The Frenchmen were in Pakistan to help build one of the submarines.
Evidence suggests that former president Jacques Chirac decided to order the cancellation of the commissions after it was discovered that they were in part re-routed back to France to fund political activities of Chirac’s principal political rival, Edouard Balladur.
The documents now in possession of Paris-based judge Renaud Van Ruymbeke were found during a French police search in June 2010 of the house of Amir Lodhi, one of the intermediaries involved in securing the Agosta contract. At the time of the raid, Mr Lodhi apparently had copy of a report by the Ehtesab Bureau.
Mr Lodhi, 61, the brother of a former Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations, is a close friend of Mr Zardari.
The raid on Mr Lodhi’s home in Paris was carried out by officers of the national financial investigation division, the DNIF, which wrote a report on the Ehtesab Bureau documents. This report alleges that Mr Zardari received ‘backhanders’ worth 6.9 million euros between October and December of 1994.
The report is now among the evidence collected by Van Ruymbeke in his investigations launched last autumn.
Originally written in English, the document was translated by the DNIF investigators and now provides the first clear details about the scale of the payments made to Mr Zardari as well as the channels used, including offshore companies, bank accounts and a British tax haven.
In Islamabad, Farah Naz Ispahani, a media adviser to the president, said she had not seen the report. “I cannot comment on the issue because I did not see the report. At this moment I can’t contact President Zardari to give the official word because he is in Washington meeting President Barack Obama,” she said.
Attempts were made to contact Presidency’s spokesman Farhatullah Babar, who is accompanying the president on the visit to the US, but there was no response.
