Bhutto Clan Leaves Trail of Corruption

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HOUSE OF GRAFT: Tracing the Bhutto Millions -- A special report.; Bhutto Clan Leaves Trail of Corruption​

By JOHN F. BURNS
Published: January 9, 1998

A decade after she led this impoverished nation from military rule to democracy, Benazir Bhutto is at the heart of a widening corruption inquiry that Pakistani investigators say has traced more than $100 million to foreign bank accounts and properties controlled by Ms. Bhutto's family.

Starting from a cache of Bhutto family documents bought for $1 million from a shadowy intermediary, the investigators have detailed a pattern of secret payments by foreign companies that sought favors during Ms. Bhutto's two terms as Prime Minister.

The documents leave uncertain the degree of involvement by Ms. Bhutto, a Harvard graduate whose rise to power in 1988 made her the first woman to lead a Muslim country. But they trace the pervasive role of her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, who turned his marriage to Ms. Bhutto into a source of virtually unchallengeable power.

In 1995, a leading French military contractor, Dassault Aviation, agreed to pay Mr. Zardari and a Pakistani partner $200 million for a $4 billion jet fighter deal that fell apart only when Ms. Bhutto's Government was dismissed. In another deal, a leading Swiss company hired to curb customs fraud in Pakistan paid millions of dollars between 1994 and 1996 to offshore companies controlled by Mr. Zardari and Ms. Bhutto's widowed mother, Nusrat.

In the largest single payment investigators have discovered, a gold bullion dealer in the Middle East was shown to have deposited at least $10 million into an account controlled by Mr. Zardari after the Bhutto Government gave him a monopoly on gold imports that sustained Pakistan's jewelry industry. The money was deposited into a Citibank account in the United Arab Emirate of Dubai, one of several Citibank accounts for companies owned by Mr. Zardari.

Together, the documents provided an extraordinarily detailed look at high-level corruption in Pakistan, a nation so poor that perhaps 70 percent of its 130 million people are illiterate, and millions have no proper shelter, no schools, no hospitals, not even safe drinking water. During Ms. Bhutto's five years in power, the economy became so enfeebled that she spent much of her time negotiating new foreign loans to stave off default on $62 billion in public debt.

A worldwide search for properties secretly bought by the Bhutto family is still in its early stages. But the inquiry has already found that Mr. Zardari went on a shopping spree in the mid-1990's, purchasing among other things a $4 million, 355-acre estate south of London. In 1994 and 1995, he used a Swiss bank account and an American Express card to buy jewelry worth $660,000 -- including $246,000 at Cartier Inc. and Bulgari Corp. in Beverly Hills, Calif., in barely a month.

In separate interviews in Karachi, Ms. Bhutto, 44, and Mr. Zardari, 42, declined to address specific questions about the Pakistani inquiry, which they dismissed as a political vendetta by Ms. Bhutto's successor as Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif. In Karachi Central Prison, where he has been held for 14 months on charges of murdering Ms. Bhutto's brother, Mr. Zardari described the corruption allegations as part of a ''meaningless game.'' But he offered no challenge to the authenticity of the documents tracing some of his most lucrative deals.

Ms. Bhutto originally kindled wild enthusiasms in Pakistan with her populist politics, then suffered a heavy loss of support as the corruption allegations gained credence. In an interview at her fortresslike home set back from Karachi's Arabian Sea beachfront, she was by turns tearful and defiant. ''Most of those documents are fabricated,'' she said, ''and the stories that have been spun around them are absolutely wrong.''

But she refused to discuss any of the specific deals outlined in the documents, and did not explain how her husband had paid for his property and jewelry. Lamenting what she described as ''the irreparable damage done to my standing in the world'' by the corruption inquiry, she said her family had inherited wealth, although not on the scale implied by tales of huge bank deposits and luxury properties overseas.

 

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''I mean, what is poor and what is rich?'' Ms. Bhutto asked. ''If you mean, am I rich by European standards, do I have a billion dollars, or even a hundred million dollars, even half that, no, I do not. But if you mean that I'm ordinary rich, yes, my father had three children studying at Harvard as undergraduates at the same time. But this wealth never meant anything to my brothers or me.''

The Student
Privileged Learning, Populist Platitudes

Ms. Bhutto, a student at Harvard and Oxford for six years in the 1970's, has always presented herself as a tribune of the dispossessed. In a Harvard commencement speech in 1989, she said that ''avaricious politicans'' had looted developing countries and left them without the means to tackle their social problems. Since she was ousted as Prime Minister during her second term, on Nov. 5, 1996, on charges that included gross corruption, she has been the leader of Pakistan's main opposition group, the Pakistan People's Party.

Some details of the allegations against Ms. Bhutto and Mr. Zardari appeared in European and American newspapers last fall, after Pakistani investigators began releasing some of the Bhutto family documents. But a much fuller picture emerged when several thick binders full of documents were made available to The New York Times over a period of several days in October. The Times's own investigation, lasting three months, extended from Pakistan to the Middle East, Europe and the United States, and included interviews with many of the central figures named by the Pakistani investigators.

Officials leading the inquiry in Pakistan say that the $100 million they have identified so far is only a small part of a windfall from corrupt activities. They maintain that an inquiry begun in Islamabad just after Ms. Bhutto's dismissal in 1996 found evidence that her family and associates generated more than $1.5 billion in illicit profits through kickbacks in virtually every sphere of government activity -- from rice deals, to the sell-off of state land, even rake-offs from state welfare schemes.

The Pakistani officials say their key break came last summer, when an informer offered to sell documents that appeared to have been taken from the Geneva office of Jens Schlegelmilch, whom Ms. Bhutto described as the family's attorney in Europe for more than 20 years, and as a close personal friend. Pakistani investigators have confirmed that the original asking price for the documents was $10 million. Eventually the seller traveled to London and concluded the deal for $1 million in cash.

The identity of the seller remains a mystery. Mr. Schlegelmilch, 55, developed his relationship with the Bhutto family through links between his Iranian-born wife and Ms. Bhutto's mother, who was also born in Iran. In a series of telephone interviews, he declined to say anything about Mr. Zardari and Ms. Bhutto, other than that he had not sold the documents. ''It wouldn't be worth selling out for $1 million,'' he said.

The documents included: statements for several accounts in Switzerland, including the Citibank accounts in Dubai and Geneva; letters from executives promising payoffs, with details of the percentage payments to be made; memorandums detailing meetings at which these ''commissions'' and ''remunerations'' were agreed on, and certificates incorporating the offshore companies used as fronts in the deals, many registered in the British Virgin Islands.

The documents also revealed the crucial role played by Western institutions. Apart from the companies that made payoffs, and the network of banks that handled the money -- which included Barclay's Bank and Union Bank of Switzerland as well as Citibank -- the arrangements made by the Bhutto family for their wealth relied on Western property companies, Western lawyers and a network of Western friends.

As striking as some of the payoff deals was the clinical way in which top Western executives concluded them. The documents showed painstaking negotiations over the payoffs, followed by secret contracts. In one case, involving Dassault, the contract specified elaborate arrangements intended to hide the proposed payoff for the fighter plane deal, and to prevent it from triggering French corruption laws.

Because Pakistan's efforts to uncover the deals have been handled in recent months by close aides of Prime Minister Sharif, who has alternated with Ms. Bhutto at the head of four civilian Governments in Pakistan since the end of military rule 10 years ago, the investigation has been deeply politicized. Last week, the Sharif aides forwarded 12 corruption cases cases against Ms. Bhutto, Mr. Zardari and Nusrat Bhutto, 68, to the country's ''accountability commission,'' headed by a retired judge, who has the power to approve formal indictments.

 

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Apart from bolstering Mr. Sharif's power by exposing Ms. Bhutto, Mr. Sharif's aides hope to protect him against the possibility that she will one day return to office and turn the tables on him. Mr. Sharif, who is 48, battled for years during Ms. Bhutto's tenure to stay out of jail on a range of corruption charges, including allegations that he took millions of dollars in unsecured loans from state-owned banks for his family's steel empire, then defaulted.

The Heritage
Landowning Class Accustomed to Rule

The Bhuttos are among a few hundred so-called feudal families, mostly large landowners, that have dominated politics and business in Pakistan since its creation in 1947.

Ms. Bhutto's father was an Oxford-educated landowner who became Pakistan's Prime Minister in the 1970's, only to be ousted and jailed in 1977 when his military chief, Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, mounted a coup. Mr. Bhutto was hanged two years later, after he refused General Zia's offer of clemency for a murder conviction that many Pakistanis regarded as politically tainted.

Benazir Bhutto, the eldest of four children, spent the next decade under house arrest, in jail or in self-imposed exile, campaigning against General Zia's military regime.

In 1987 she married Mr. Zardari, little known then for anything but a passion for polo. It was an arranged union, with Ms. Bhutto's mother picking the groom. Many Pakistanis were startled by the social and financial differences. By the Bhuttos' standards, Mr. Zardari's family was of modest means, with limited holdings and a rundown movie theater in Karachi. Mr. Zardari's only experience of higher education was a stint at a commercial college in London.

In part the match was intended to protect Ms. Bhutto's political career by countering conservative Muslims' grumbling about her unmarried status. Barely eight months later, in 1988, General Zia was killed in a mysterious plane crash, which opened the way for Ms. Bhutto to win a narrow election victory.

Years later, many Pakistanis still speak of the mesmeric effect she had at that moment, as the daughter who had avenged her father and the politician who had restored democracy. But euphoria faded fast. Within months, newspapers were headlining allegations of dubious deals. In the bazaars, traders soon dubbed Mr. Zardari ''Mr. 10 Percent.''

Twenty months after she took office, Ms. Bhutto was dismissed by Pakistan's President on grounds of corruption and misrule. But the Sharif Government that succeeded Ms. Bhutto was unable to secure any convictions against her or her husband before Mr. Sharif, in turn, was ousted from office, also for corruption and misrule.

Mostly, Pakistanis gave Ms. Bhutto the benefit of the doubt after her first term, saying she might not have known what Mr. Zardari was doing. She was further aided by public suspicion of Mr. Sharif's motives. A taciturn man who got his start in politics as a protege of General Zia, Mr. Sharif has left little doubt of his chagrin at having been overshadowed by Ms. Bhutto.

Part of his discomfort stemmed from her success in fostering a favorable image for herself in the United States, as a staunch foe of Muslim fundamentalism, a relentless campaigner for the rights of the poor and -- a point she stressed in her Harvard speech in 1989 -- an opponent of leaders who use their power for personal gain, then ''leave the cupboard bare.''

When she took office as Prime Minister again, after a victory in 1993, Ms. Bhutto struck many of her friends as a changed person, obsessed with her dismissal in 1990, high-handed to the point of arrogance, and contemptuous of the liberal principles she had placed at the center of her politics in the 1980's. ''She no longer made the distinction between the Bhuttos and Pakistan,'' said Hussain Haqqani, Ms. Bhutto's former press secretary. ''In her mind, she was Pakistan, so she could do as she pleased.''

Ms. Bhutto's twin posts, as Prime Minister and Finance Minister, gave her virtually free rein. Mr. Zardari became her alter ego, riding roughshod over the bureaucracy although he had no formal economic powers until Ms. Bhutto appointed him Investment Minister, reporting only to herself, in July 1996. They maintained an imperial lifestyle in the new Prime Minister's residence in Islamabad, a $50 million mansion set on 110 acres on an Islamabad hilltop.

Within weeks of moving in, Mr. Zardari ordered 11.5 acres of protected woodland on an adjoining hilltop to be bulldozed for a polo field, an exercise track, stabling for 40 polo ponies, quarters for grooms and a parking lot for spectators. When a senior Government official, Mohammed Mehdi, objected to paying for the project with $1.3 million diverted from a budget for parks and other public amenities, Mr. Zardari ''categorically told me that he does not appreciate his orders to be examined and questioned by any authority,'' according to an affidavit filed with the Pakistani investigators by Mr. Mehdi. A few months later, with the work in progress, Mr. Zardari had Mr. Mehdi dismissed.

 

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The investigators say that Mr. Zardari and associates he brought into the Government, some of them old school friends, began reviewing state programs for opportunities to make money. It was these broader activities, the investigators assert, more than the relatively small number of foreign deals revealed in the documents taken from the Swiss lawyer, that netted the largest sums for the Bhutto family.

Among the transactions Mr. Zardari exploited, according to these officials: defense contracts; power plant projects; the privatization of state-owned industries; the awarding of broadcast licenses; the granting of an export monopoly for the country's huge rice harvest; the purchase of planes for Pakistan International Airlines; the assignment of textile export quotas; the granting of oil and gas permits; authorizations to build sugar mills, and the sale of government lands.

The officials have said that Ms. Bhutto and Mr. Zardari took pains to avoid creating a documentary record of their role in hundreds of deals. How this was done was explained by Najam Sethi, a former Bhutto loyalist who became the editor of Pakistan's most popular political weekly, Friday Times, then was drafted to help oversee a corruption inquiry undertaken by the caretaker Government that ruled for three months after Ms. Bhutto's dismissal in 1996.

Mr. Sethi said Ms. Bhutto and Mr. Zardari adopted a system under which they assigned favors by writing orders on yellow Post-It notes and attaching them to official files. After the deals were completed, Mr. Sethi said, the notes were removed, destroying all trace of involvement.

When Mr. Sharif won a landslide election victory earlier this year, the corruption inquiry appeared, again, to fizzle. But a few days before the election, the caretakers hired Jules Kroll Associates, a New York investigative agency, to look for evidence of corruption abroad. The Kroll investigators put out feelers in Europe; Mr. Sharif's aides said it was one of these that produced the offer to sell the Bhutto family documents, and that they took over from Kroll Associates and completed the deal.

The Negotiations
Flight and Crash Of a Dassault Deal


Potentially the most lucrative deal uncovered by the documents involved the effort by Dassault Aviation, the French military contractor, to sell Pakistan 32 Mirage 2000-5 fighter planes. These were to replace two squadrons of American-made F-16's whose purchase was blocked when the Bush Administration determined in 1990 that Pakistan was covertly developing nuclear weapons.

In April 1995, Dassault found itself in arm's-length negotiations with Mr. Zardari and Amer Lodhi, a Paris-based lawyer and banker who had lived for years in the United States, working among other things as an executive of the now-defunct Bank of Commerce and Credit International. Mr. Lodhi's sister, Maleeha, a former Pakistan newspaper editor, became Ms. Bhutto's Ambassador to the United States in 1994.

Mr. Schlegelmilch, the Geneva lawyer, wrote a memo for his files describing his talks at Dassault's headquarters on the Champs-Elysees in Paris. According to the memo, the company's executives offered a ''remuneration'' of 5 percent to Marleton Business S.A., an offshore company controlled by Mr. Zardari. The memo indicated that in addition to Dassault, the payoff would be made by two companies involved in the manufacture of the Mirages: Snecma, an engine manufacturer, and Thomson-CSF, a maker of aviation electronics.

The documents offered intriguing insights into the anxieties that the deal aroused. In a letter faxed to Geneva, the Dassault executives -- Jean-Claude Carrayrou, Dassault's director of legal affairs, and Pierre Chouzenoux, the international sales manager -- wrote that ''for reasons of confidentiality,'' there would be only one copy of the contract guaranteeing the payoff. It would be kept at Dassault's Paris office, available to Mr. Schlegelmilch only during working hours.

The deal reached with Mr. Schlegelmilch reflected concerns about French corruption laws, which forbid bribery of French officials but permit payoffs to foreign officials, and even make the payoffs tax-deductible in France. The Swiss and the French have resisted American pressures to sign a worldwide treaty that would hold all businesses to the ethical standards of American law, which sets criminal penalties for bribing foreign officials.

''It is agreed that no part of the above-mentioned remuneration will be transferred to a French citizen, or to any company directly or indirectly controlled by French individuals or companies, or to any beneficiary of a resident or nonresident bank account in France,'' one of the Dassault documents reads.

 

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Negotiations on the Mirage contract were within weeks of completion when Ms. Bhutto was dismissed by another Pakistani President in 1996. They have bogged down since, partly because Pakistan has run out of money to buy the planes, and partly because the Pakistan Army, still politically powerful a decade after the end of military rule, waited until Ms. Bhutto was removed to weigh in against the purchase.

A Dassault spokesman, Jean-Pierre Robillard, said Mr. Carrayrou, the legal affairs director, had retired. Two weeks after he was sent a summary of the documents, Mr. Robillard said that the company had decided to make no comment.

The Profits
Scams at Both Ends Of Customs System


One deal that appears to have made a handsome profit for Mr. Zardari involved Pakistan's effort to increase its customs revenues. Since fewer than one in every 100 Pakistanis pays income tax, customs revenues represent the state's largest revenue source. But for decades the system has been corrupted, with businesses underinvoicing imports, or paying bribes, to escape duties.

In the 1980's Pakistan came under pressure from the International Monetary Fund to increase government revenues and to cut a runaway budget deficit. During Ms. Bhutto's first term, Pakistan entrusted preshipment ''verification'' of all major imports to two Swiss companies with blue-ribbon reputations, Societe Generale de Surveillance S.A. and a subsidiary, Cotecna Inspection S.A. But the documents suggest that this stab at improving Pakistan's fiscal soundness was quickly turned to generating profits for the Bhutto family's accounts.

In 1994, executives of the two Swiss companies wrote promising to pay ''commissions'' totaling 9 percent to three offshore companies controlled by Mr. Zardari and Nusrat Bhutto. A Cotecna letter in June 1994 was direct: ''Should we receive, within six months of today, a contract for inspection and price verification of goods imported into Pakistan,'' it read, ''we will pay you 6 percent of the total amount invoiced and paid to the Government of Pakistan for such a contract and during the whole duration of that contract and its renewal.''

Similar letters, dated March and June 1994, were sent by Societe Generale de Surveillance promising ''consultancy fees'' of 6 percent and 3 percent to two other offshore companies controlled by the Bhutto family. According to Pakistani investigators, the two Swiss companies inspected more than $15.4 billion in imports into Pakistan from January 1995 to March 1997, making more than $131 million. The investigators estimated that the Bhutto family companies made $11.8 million from the deals, at least a third of which showed up in banking documents taken from the Swiss lawyer.

For Societe Generale de Surveillance, with 35,000 employees and more than $2 billion a year in earnings, the relationship with the Bhutto family has been painful. In addition to doing customs inspections, the company awards certificates of technical quality. In effect, its business is integrity.

In an interview in Geneva, Elisabeth Salina Amorini, president of Societe Generale, said the Pakistan contracts had been the subject of an internal company inquiry. But Ms. Salina Amorini, a 42-year-old lawyer, said the company had reorganized its government contracts division under a new executive and had sold Cotecna, acquired in 1994, back to the family that had previously owned it. The internal inquiry, she told reporters in Geneva last month, had shown ''a number of inadequacies which enabled certain irregularities to take place.''

Ms. Salina Amorini said in the interview that a study of Societe Generale's dealings with Pakistan had uncovered a $650 million shortfall in customs revenues that the Bhutto Government was supposed to have collected over a 21-month period in 1995 and 1996. She said the company had reported the shortfall to Washington-based officials of the monetary fund and the World Bank, which monitor customs revenues to check Pakistan's compliance with conditions set for emergency loans. The conditions are meant to help the country avoid default on its foreign debt.

Officials at the two financial institutions are investigating the Swiss company's report to determine whether the customs system was corrupted at both ends -- from commissions paid to Bhutto family companies on the preshipment inspection contracts and, later, in illicit payments by Pakistani importers seeking to avoid the customs duties that the Swiss companies had determined they owed.

The Gold Connection
Granting a License, Reaping a Profit

Pakistan's Arabian Sea coast, stretching from Karachi to the border with Iran, has long been a gold smugglers' haven. Until the beginning of Ms. Bhutto's second term, the trade, running into hundreds of millions of dollars a year, was unregulated, with slivers of gold called biscuits, and larger weights in bullion, carried on planes and boats that travel between the Persian Gulf and the largely unguarded Pakistani coast.

 

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Shortly after Ms. Bhutto returned as Prime Minister in 1993, a Pakistani bullion trader in Dubai, Abdul Razzak Yaqub, proposed a deal: in return for a license to import gold, Mr. Razzak would help the Government regularize the trade.

In January 1994, weeks after Ms. Bhutto began her second term, Mr. Schlegelmilch established a British Virgin Island company known as Capricorn Trading, S.A., with Mr. Zardari as its principal owner. Nine months later, on Oct. 5, 1994, an account was opened at the Dubai offices of Citibank in the name of Capricorn Trading. The same day, a Citibank deposit slip for the account shows a deposit of $5 million by Mr. Razzak's company, ARY Traders. Two weeks later, another Citibank deposit slip showed that ARY had paid a further $5 million.

In November 1994, Pakistan's Commerce Ministry wrote to Mr. Razzak informing him that he had been granted a license that made him, for at least the next two years, Pakistan's sole authorized gold importer. In an interview in his office in Dubai, Mr. Razzak acknowedged that he had used the license to import more than $500 million in gold into Pakistan, and that he had traveled to Islamabad several times to meet with Ms. Bhutto and Mr. Zardari. But he denied that there had been any secret deal. ''I have not paid a single cent to Zardari,'' he said.

Mr. Razzak offered an unusual explanation for the Citibank documents that showed his company paying the $10 million to Mr. Zardari, suggesting that someone in Pakistan who wished to destroy his reputation had contrived to have his company wrongly identified as the depositor of the money. ''Somebody in the bank has cooperated with my enemies to make false documents,'' he said.

The Documentation
Erasing the Proofs Of Secret Power


The Pakistani investigation of Ms. Bhutto's two terms in office has tied a range of overseas properties to her husband and other family members. Among these are Rockwood, a 355-acre estate south of London, and a $2.5 million country manor in Normandy. The listed owners of the manor, which is known as the House of the White Queen, are Hakim and Zarrin Zardari.

Other properties that Pakistani investigators have linked to members of the Bhutto family include a string of luxury apartments in London. Pakistan has asked the United States Justice Department to investigate still more bank accounts and properties, including a country club and a polo ranch in Palm Beach County, Florida, said to be worth about $4 million, that were bought by associates of Mr. Zardari in the mid-1990's.

The Pakistani request to Washington, made in December, also sought help in checking allegations that some of Mr. Zardari's wealth may have come from Pakistani drug traffickers paying for protection. In the past decade, Pakistan and its neighbor Afghanistan have become the world's largest source of heroin, shipping 250 tons of it every year to Europe and the United States.

The purchase of overseas properties by well-connected members of the elite in a developing country is hardly a new phenomenon. But the disclosures about Ms. Bhutto's family have underscored a trend that international financial officials have long found troubling: the willingness of the monetary fund and the World Bank to prop up economies like Pakistan's that have been bled dry by corruption.

A former high-ranking official of the World Bank in Islamabad who requested anonymity acknowledged that both institutions were all too willing to make additional loans on the vague promise that corruption would be reined in. ''We made a mantra out of the phrase 'good governance,' '' the official said, ''as though we intended to try and stamp the corruption out. But the truth is that we turned a blind eye.''

In the years Ms. Bhutto was in office, Pakistan received billions of dollars in new loans, mostly to enable it to pay interest on its debt. By 1996, interest on the accumulated public debt, including $32 billion in foreign loans, was absorbing nearly 70 percent of state revenues. With Pakistan's defense costs absorbing the remaining 30 percent, scarcely anything was left for the social programs that Ms. Bhutto had promised.

While the Times inquiry confirmed some of the allegations made by the Pakistani investigators, other matters remained unresolved. For example, none of the documents for the foreign bank accounts or offshore companies uncovered thus far bear Ms. Bhutto's name, nor do any of the letters promising payoffs make any mention of her.

 

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The only document that refers to Ms. Bhutto is a handwritten ledger for an account at the Union Bank of Switzerland in Geneva. In Mr. Schlegelmilch's handwriting, the ledger contains the notation ''50% AAZ 50 % BB.'' This account showed deposits of $1.8 million for one 90-day period in 1994 and received at least $860,000 in payments by the two Swiss customs-inspection companies.

Some of Ms. Bhutto's friends say she cannot fairly be held accountable for her husband's questionable deals, since she was too busy as Prime Minister to know of them. Others say Ms. Bhutto, having lost her father and both of her brothers in tragic circumstances, became overdependent emotionally on Mr. Zardari.

Her younger brother, Shahnawaz, died of poisoning in Cannes, France, in 1985 after a dispute that Murtaza Bhutto, her older brother, linked to arguments over family assets stashed in Switzerland. Murtaza Bhutto was killed in September 1986 after a long-running power struggle with his sister and her husband. Mr. Zardari has been charged with masterminding the second murder, but he and Ms. Bhutto say he was framed.

Officials say Mr. Zardari made no attempt to disguise his activities from his wife, holding meetings on some of his deals in the Prime Minister's residence, and invoking his wife's authority when ordering officials to override regulations meant to prevent graft in the assignment of contracts.

Furthermore, several senior officials in Ms. Bhutto's Governments said they had met with repeated rebuffs when they tried to warn her about Mr. Zardari. One senior minister said that when he had raised the issue, ''She said, 'How dare you talk to me like that?' and stalked out.''

Nor has Ms. Bhutto made any effort to distance herself from Mr. Zardari. In the Karachi interview, she said her husband's deals had been made only for Pakistan's benefit. ''He's a very generous person,'' she said. ''His weakness, and his strength, is that he's always trying to help people.''

The tax returns filed by Ms. Bhutto and her husband in her years in office give no hint of the wealth uncovered by the Pakistani inquiry. Ms. Bhutto, Mr. Zardari and Nusrat Bhutto declared assets totaling $1.2 million in 1996 and never told authorities of any foreign accounts or properties, as required by law. Mr. Zardari declared no net assets at all in 1990, the year Ms. Bhutto's first term ended, and only $402,000 in 1996.

The family's income tax declarations were similarly modest. The highest income Ms. Bhutto declared was $42,200 in 1996, with $5,110 in tax. In two of her years as Prime Minister, 1993 and 1994, she paid no income tax at all. Mr. Zardari's highest declared income was $13,100, also in 1996, when interest on bank deposits he controlled in Switzerland exceeded that much every week.

Pakistan's inquiry is in its early phases, but it has already prompted international action. Swiss officials have frozen 17 bank accounts belonging to the Bhutto family, and authorities in Britain and France are searching for other accounts and properties.

Ms. Bhutto described the investigation as a persecution. At one point she attacked the Clinton Administration, saying it had ignored her plight while deploring the treatment of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese opposition leader and Nobel laureate.

''This is the most horrendous human rights record, what is happening to me, the former Prime Minister of Pakistan,'' Ms. Bhutto said. ''It is shocking to see that the Clinton Administration talks so much about Burma, when this is happening to a woman who leads the opposition here.'' Tears welling in her eyes, she added, ''The Bhuttos have suffered so much for Pakistan.''


Correction: January 10, 1998, Saturday An article yesterday about corruption in Pakistan misstated the year that the brother of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was killed. It was 1996, not 1986.

Because of an editing error, the article also referred incompletely to Hakim and Zarrin Zardari, the owners of a manor house in Normandy. They are the parents of Mrs. Bhutto's husband, Asif Ali Zardari, who is the focus of a corruption inquiry.

Correction: January 23, 1998, Friday An article on Jan. 9 about the financial dealings of the family of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan referred incorrectly to the holder of a 1990 contract to provide preshipment verification of major imports for the Pakistani Government. The contract signed by Ms. Bhutto's Government was with Cotecna, a Swiss concern, which later became an affiliate of Societe Generale de Surveillance, another Swiss company; S.G.S. was not the holder of the 1990 contract.

Source

 

[asaad-ul-islam]

PPP nay qurbai dee! Jeay Bhutto! BB zinda hai! PPP nay sabse ziada qurbani dee!

PPP nay kitne qurbani dee! Look Neo! Look hard at your future! Jeay Bhutto!

http://www.defence.pk/forums/general-images-multimedia/13611-bhuttostan.html

 

[z9-ec]

lol, Assad. Seriously, everything is being named Bhutto even hospitals, airports and things which were built during President Musharraf's tenure!

Here's an interesting poem I found:

Ab Full Corruption Ki Baari Hai

Q K Ab Daur-E-Zardari Hai

Ab Lootna Maal Sarkari Hai

Q K Ab Daur-E-Zardari Hai

Ab Ap Ki Izzat Apki Apni Zimmedari Hai

Q K Izzat Ka Shikari Asif Ali Zardari Hai

Ab Photi Qismat Hamari Hai

Q K Ab Nawaz Sharif Ka Bhai Asif Ali Zaedari Hai


Writer : Rehman Dakait (Liyari)

 

[fatman17]

The only document that refers to Ms. Bhutto is a handwritten ledger for an account at the Union Bank of Switzerland in Geneva. In Mr. Schlegelmilch's handwriting, the ledger contains the notation ''50% AAZ 50 % BB.'' This account showed deposits of $1.8 million for one 90-day period in 1994 and received at least $860,000 in payments by the two Swiss customs-inspection companies.

Some of Ms. Bhutto's friends say she cannot fairly be held accountable for her husband's questionable deals, since she was too busy as Prime Minister to know of them. Others say Ms. Bhutto, having lost her father and both of her brothers in tragic circumstances, became overdependent emotionally on Mr. Zardari.

Her younger brother, Shahnawaz, died of poisoning in Cannes, France, in 1985 after a dispute that Murtaza Bhutto, her older brother, linked to arguments over family assets stashed in Switzerland. Murtaza Bhutto was killed in September 1986 after a long-running power struggle with his sister and her husband. Mr. Zardari has been charged with masterminding the second murder, but he and Ms. Bhutto say he was framed.

Officials say Mr. Zardari made no attempt to disguise his activities from his wife, holding meetings on some of his deals in the Prime Minister's residence, and invoking his wife's authority when ordering officials to override regulations meant to prevent graft in the assignment of contracts.

Furthermore, several senior officials in Ms. Bhutto's Governments said they had met with repeated rebuffs when they tried to warn her about Mr. Zardari. One senior minister said that when he had raised the issue, ''She said, 'How dare you talk to me like that?' and stalked out.''

Nor has Ms. Bhutto made any effort to distance herself from Mr. Zardari. In the Karachi interview, she said her husband's deals had been made only for Pakistan's benefit. ''He's a very generous person,'' she said. ''His weakness, and his strength, is that he's always trying to help people.''

The tax returns filed by Ms. Bhutto and her husband in her years in office give no hint of the wealth uncovered by the Pakistani inquiry. Ms. Bhutto, Mr. Zardari and Nusrat Bhutto declared assets totaling $1.2 million in 1996 and never told authorities of any foreign accounts or properties, as required by law. Mr. Zardari declared no net assets at all in 1990, the year Ms. Bhutto's first term ended, and only $402,000 in 1996.

The family's income tax declarations were similarly modest. The highest income Ms. Bhutto declared was $42,200 in 1996, with $5,110 in tax. In two of her years as Prime Minister, 1993 and 1994, she paid no income tax at all. Mr. Zardari's highest declared income was $13,100, also in 1996, when interest on bank deposits he controlled in Switzerland exceeded that much every week.

Pakistan's inquiry is in its early phases, but it has already prompted international action. Swiss officials have frozen 17 bank accounts belonging to the Bhutto family, and authorities in Britain and France are searching for other accounts and properties.

Ms. Bhutto described the investigation as a persecution. At one point she attacked the Clinton Administration, saying it had ignored her plight while deploring the treatment of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese opposition leader and Nobel laureate.

''This is the most horrendous human rights record, what is happening to me, the former Prime Minister of Pakistan,'' Ms. Bhutto said. ''It is shocking to see that the Clinton Administration talks so much about Burma, when this is happening to a woman who leads the opposition here.'' Tears welling in her eyes, she added, ''The Bhuttos have suffered so much for Pakistan.''


Correction: January 10, 1998, Saturday An article yesterday about corruption in Pakistan misstated the year that the brother of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was killed. It was 1996, not 1986.

Because of an editing error, the article also referred incompletely to Hakim and Zarrin Zardari, the owners of a manor house in Normandy. They are the parents of Mrs. Bhutto's husband, Asif Ali Zardari, who is the focus of a corruption inquiry.

Correction: January 23, 1998, Friday An article on Jan. 9 about the financial dealings of the family of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan referred incorrectly to the holder of a 1990 contract to provide preshipment verification of major imports for the Pakistani Government. The contract signed by Ms. Bhutto's Government was with Cotecna, a Swiss concern, which later became an affiliate of Societe Generale de Surveillance, another Swiss company; S.G.S. was not the holder of the 1990 contract.

Source

i wonder if any of our media channels would have the b***s to print / discuss this report in english and urdu now!

 

[dr.umer]

Corruption allegations still haunt Pakistan's new power - Newsweek

Aug 20, 2008

Asif Ali Zardari, the Pakistani politician considered a front runner to become the country's next president, remains under criminal investigation in Switzerland over allegations that he received kickbacks from two Swiss-based companies while his wife, the late Benazir Bhutto, served as the country's prime minister in the 1990s, a Swiss judge and two Swiss lawyers close to the case told NEWSWEEK.

But Zardari, who has always claimed that corruption allegations against him were politically motivated, may be using his growing political clout in Islamabad to pressure Swiss authorities to curtail, or even close, their long-running investigation into his affairs, say Swiss legal sources, who requested anonymity discussing sensitive matters.

Zadari, through a spokeswoman, maintains that the probe is already closed. "Mr. Zardari feels that you have been misinformed and that the case that you are referring to is closed," wrote Farah Ispahani, in response to an e-mail from NEWSWEEK. "Please be careful about reporting something that may have been planted."

Zardari, who co-chairs Bhutto's political movement and was one of her closest advisers when she headed Pakistan's government, has emerged as perhaps the most powerful figure in Pakistani politics following the resignation this week of President Pervez Musharraf. U.S. officials say they already view Zardari as one of most important Pakistani officials the U.S. deals with on sensitive issues such as the hunt for Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders in volatile tribal areas along the country's border with Afghanistan.

But U.S. officials remain wary of Zardari because of corruption allegations that have swirled around him for years. In the 1990s, when Bhutto served two terms as prime minister and her spouse served a stint as investment minister, Zardari earned the nickname of "Mr. Ten Percent" because of allegations that he had received kickbacks on state contracts. He spent more than eight years in jail in Pakistan during corruption investigations, though he was never convicted of any crime.

Zardari, Bhutto and their supporters have always maintained that the corruption allegations against the couple were trumped up by powerful political enemies, including both Musharraf and Nawaz Sharif, a former prime minister who is now Zardari's principal rival for power. Lawyers for Bhutto and Zardari say they always maintained their innocence of any corruption or other criminal accusations. "For most Pakistanis this is a matter that is now closed," said a senior Pakistani government official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "The primary motivation [behind the investigations] was political."

The Swiss investigations were opened years ago, during Sharif's tenure as prime minister. His government requested official legal assistance from Switzerland, where Pakistani authorities suspected that the couple had stashed proceeds from alleged corrupt activities. The Pakistani government hired its own lawyers in Switzerland to gather evidence against Bhutto and Zardari and help Swiss investigators with their inquiries.

In 2003, these investigations resulted in a series of court orders against Bhutto, Zardari and one of their Swiss lawyers, Jens Schlegelmilch. The orders, akin to misdemeanor guilty findings by a U.S. justice of the peace, were issued by Judge Daniel Devaud, an investigating magistrate in Geneva who has handled many high-profile investigations into the alleged laundering of corrupt payments through Switzerland by foreign politicians.

 

[dr.umer]

Graft cases dog Bhutto’s widower - LosAngles Times

During the stormy years Benazir Bhutto ruled Pakistan, her husband was a top power broker and a prime target of corruption allegations that toppled her.

The assassination of the former prime minister has pushed her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, back into the heart of the storm. Their political party this week named Zardari to run its day-to-day affairs while appointing the couple’s 19-year-old son to the ceremonial role of chairman.

Even though Zardari has said he will not run for parliament in upcoming elections, attention has focused once again on the corruption cases that have swirled around him at home and abroad and made him a polarizing figure even within the Pakistan People’s Party.

The political strife of the moment makes it especially difficult to assess the allegations against Zardari in Pakistan. But several cases in Europe offer insight into the longtime suspicions that have haunted him and, to some extent, his late wife. The cases raise questions about the sources of the family’s vast wealth and the elaborate, secretive way in which the couple allegedly moved money around the world.

The accusations center on the dapper Zardari, 51, a former polo player whose critics nicknamed him “Mr. 10%” because of his alleged taste for bribes. After Bhutto’s second government fell in 1996, authorities imprisoned Zardari on charges of graft. Pakistan’s anti-corruption agency pursued investigations overseas, and authorities in several countries opened their own inquiries.

Zardari was released in 2004 and went into exile. His defenders say Pakistani authorities framed him with fabricated evidence and abused him while in custody, an experience that inflicted lasting damage on his health.

Some of Bhutto’s supporters have said the investigations were politically driven attempts to destroy her. In October, President Pervez Musharraf approved an amnesty for Bhutto, allowing her to return home and launch her ill-fated campaign.

The most significant European cases are a Swiss money-laundering inquiry and a British civil case. They remain open, but prospects were uncertain even before the assassination. Lawyers for the couple had won court skirmishes and, in interviews before Bhutto’s death, predicted that the amnesty in Pakistan would cause the accusations to be shelved. Spanish prosecutors recently closed a three-year investigation of Bhutto, citing lack of evidence.

But in 2003, a Swiss investigative magistrate decided he had the goods on Zardari and Bhutto after pursuing a money trail from offshore companies in the Caribbean to banks in Geneva to a jewelry shop here.

Judge Daniel Devaud took advantage of a Swiss law allowing investigative magistrates to issue a summary verdict if they think the evidence is strong, and convicted Zardari and Bhutto of money laundering. The judge ruled that Swiss firms had bribed the couple in return for a Pakistani government contract. He froze about $12 million in suspected kickbacks.

But a Swiss appeals court promptly set aside the verdict. A new magistrate reopened the investigation on charges of aggravated money laundering, a more serious offense based on the suspicion of systematic criminal activity.

Zardari’s Swiss lawyer declined to comment on the specifics of the case. But he said his client, who served as a legislator and environment minister for Bhutto, had done nothing wrong.

“Mr. Zardari denies having committed any crime whatsoever,” the lawyer, Saverio Lembo, said in an interview before Bhutto’s assassination.

In his 2003 verdict, the Swiss judge connected Zardari to a chain of corruption that began with two Swiss companies, Cotecna and SGS. Starting in 1994, company executives courted Zardari in hopes of landing a contract to provide container inspection equipment and expertise to the Pakistani customs agency, according to Swiss court records.
A Swiss advisor of the Bhutto family, lawyer Jens Schlegelmilch, acted as an intermediary for executives who, according to internal SGS memos, saw Zardari as Pakistan’s unofficial “deputy prime minister.”

After talks with Zardari, the two companies won the contract in 1995 “upon the decision of Benazir Bhutto” and “despite the opposition of the customs service,” the judge found.

As part of a secret deal, the judge found, the Swiss contractors funneled $11.9 million in bribes into three offshore firms in the British Virgin Islands and ultimately into bank accounts in Geneva. The nominal owners of two companies were Bhutto’s mother and brother-in-law, according to the records.

The judge found that Zardari owned the third company, Bomer Finance, which received about $8 million, and that “Bhutto shares with her husband the assets” and “has power of disposition” over the company, according to the documents.

Bhutto denied in testimony that she had anything to do with Bomer, according to her lawyer in Geneva, Alec Reymond.

Nonetheless, Judge Devaud portrayed the former prime minister as a knowing participant. He wrote in his verdict: “Bhutto thus knew that she was acting in a criminally reprehensible manner by abusing her role in order to obtain for herself or her husband considerable sums … at the cost of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.”

In addition to rejecting the allegation of Bhutto’s involvement, Reymond said the judge erred in depicting payments as bribes.

“The money is there; commissions were paid,” Reymond said. “I do not think Mr. Zardari disputes that. But they were like the commissions that are paid to hundreds of businessmen. There was nothing irregular or illegal about them.”

The judge gave Zardari, Bhutto and Schlegelmilch suspended six-month sentences, but the appellate court set them aside. In the new inquiry, another investigate magistrate submitted his conclusions in October to the prosecutor general of Geneva, who must decide whether to pursue a trial.

Bhutto testified in the new investigation, but Zardari has not, according to lawyers and court documents.

In Britain, the decade-old civil proceedings focus on Zardari. In a lawsuit, the Pakistani government accused him of using illicit funds to acquire the 365-acre Rockwood estate, a $6.5-million property featuring a Tudor-style mansion and two adjoining farms in the Surrey district. The estate was bought and refurbished in 1995 through trusts in the Isle of Man and Liechtenstein and the Caribbean firms linked to Bhutto, Zardari and the alleged kickbacks, according to the lawsuit.

Zardari steadfastly denied ownership until January 2006, when he acknowledged he owned the property, according to British court records.

A month later, a court on the Isle of Man concluded that it did not find evidence that proceeds of corruption were used to buy and refurbish the estate, according to the records.

British lawyers representing the Pakistani government then filed a lawsuit in the High Court in London seeking the proceeds of the sale of the estate. Zardari challenged the jurisdiction of the court, which rejected his motion in October 2006.

In his ruling, Judge Lawrence Collins emphasized that he was not making legal findings about the facts, but instead issuing a preliminary assessment of the case. He said that “there was no direct evidence” the estate was bought with illicit funds, according to the records.

On the other hand, the judge did rule that Pakistan has a “reasonable prospect” of proving that funds used to refurbish the estate were “the fruits of corruption,” according to the documents.

The allegations of corruption have yet to be proved in court. A civil trial had been expected to take place in London sometime this year. But the assassination has left that possibility, like so much about the future of Pakistan and the Bhutto clan, in limbo.

 

[dr.umer]

i wonder if any of our media channels would have the b***s to print / discuss this report in english and urdu now!

None of them would never ever do that as long as these corrupts are in power. In US, we have one FOX CHANNEL. In Pakistan we have more than one FOX CHANNELS & one of them is called GEO. So lets enjoy democracy fellows

 

[JK!]

The Bhuttos are the flavour of the month with airports and other buildings being named after BB so this sort of news will just be brushed under the carpet by the media.

 

[dr.umer]

From Prison to Zenith of Politics in Pakistan - NewYork Times

March 11, 2008

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of the slain opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, now sits at the pinnacle of Pakistani politics. It is a startling comeback for a man who, though never convicted here, spent 11 years in jail here on corruption and murder charges as one of Pakistan’s most ostracized figures.

The election victory last month of Ms. Bhutto’s party, which he now leads, has left Mr. Zardari, 51, Pakistan’s kingmaker. He came closer than ever to official rehabilitation last week, when a court here dropped many of the corruption cases against him.

The last two cases in Pakistan are scheduled to be dismissed this week. These days, Mr. Zardari’s most pressing concern is whom to choose as prime minister, a decision he is expected to make any day now.

Mr. Zardari’s sudden revival is a reminder of how Pakistan has veered between military rule and civilian governments that have been dogged by allegations of corruption, and how those cases can be prosecuted — or wiped away — depending on the political winds.

The dismissal of the corruption cases was a key demand by Ms. Bhutto as she negotiated her return to Pakistan after eight years in exile, under an American-backed power sharing deal intended to preserve President Pervez Musharraf.

But it is Mr. Zardari who has become the accidental beneficiary of that plan, which is now in shreds. On Sunday, he and the other main opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, said they would seek to curb what remained of the president’s already diminished powers. The pair pledged to bring an end to the Musharraf era.

In an interview just before the elections, Mr. Zardari said the cases against him were politically driven. The accord agreed to by Mr. Musharraf, known as the National Reconciliation Order, and on which the court acted last week, exonerated him, he said.

“Before she laid down her life she made sure that the world acknowledged, everybody acknowledged that they were politically motivated cases,” Mr. Zardari said of Ms. Bhutto in an interview just before the elections. “So I think I am exonerated.”

In the interview, Mr. Zardari seemed almost impervious to the corruption cases, and to the fact that he remained on bail with more than a dozen other defendants on conspiracy charges in the 1996 murder of his brother-in-law, Murtaza Bhutto. Ms. Bhutto said the killing was a plot by Pakistani intelligence agencies to divide and weaken her family.

“They always come to me through legality,” Mr. Zardari said. “They always have a legal reason. After all, Christ was tried. It is not that they didn’t give him a trial. They did. How good the trial was, that is another thing.”

The National Reconciliation Order absolved politicians, bankers and bureaucrats — but not ordinary citizens — charged with corruption offenses from 1988 to October 1999, when Mr. Musharraf grabbed power in a bloodless coup.

The five cases against Mr. Zardari that were dismissed last week ranged from charges that he took $10 million in kickbacks from a gold importing company to allegations that he improperly used government funds to build a polo ground at the prime minister’s residence in Islamabad.

In the gold case, Mr. Zardari was charged with taking bribes from ARY International Exchange, a gold bullion dealership based in Dubai, in exchange for awarding the company an exclusive license in 1994 to import more than $500 million worth of gold that was used in Pakistan’s jewelry businesses.

A report on private banking and money laundering in the United States Congress in 1999 said Mr. Zardari had accumulated $40 million in Citibank accounts. In describing the ARY case, the report cited allegations that some of Mr. Zardari’s Citibank accounts were used to “disguise $10 million in kickbacks for a gold importing contract in Pakistan.” Mr. Zardari always denied the charges, and the head of the company, Abdul Razzak Yaqub, denied he had paid bribes.

Another case that was dismissed by the anticorruption court involved charges that Mr. Zardari had received illegal commissions from two Swiss companies, Cotecna, and Société Générale de Surveillance, after the companies were awarded a contract for pre-shipment inspections for imports to Pakistan.

That case is also being tried in Switzerland. In 2003, a Swiss magistrate found him and Ms. Bhutto guilty on money laundering charges, and ordered them to return $12 million to the Pakistani government. The couple fought the charges vigorously and appealed the case, prompting a new investigation by the Swiss authorities that resulted in new charges of aggravated money laundering.

Mr. Zardari, who has various health problems and declined to show up at hearings in Geneva after his release from prison in 2004 on the grounds that he was too ill, has continued to appeal the case, now being heard by the court of appeals there.

In Britain, Mr. Zardari faces a civil case brought in connection with a country manor with hundreds of acres in southern England where he made extensive renovations, including the installation of an imitation of a local pub.

The Pakistani government is seeking to recover the money that Mr. Zardari used to pay for the manor on the grounds that it was ill-gotten gains. People involved in the case said last week that the case was still active and being contested by Mr. Zardari.

The corruption charges against Mr. Zardari stem from his actions during Ms. Bhutto’s two terms as prime minister, a time when he was known as “Mr. 10 Percent” because of allegations that he demanded a cut of contracts after his wife assumed office in 1988.

She was dismissed in 1990 after two years in office, and Mr. Zardari served three years in prison from 1990 to 1993 on corruption charges that were never proved.

In her second term, from 1993 to 1996, he wielded more power as minister of environment and investment. When she was dismissed in 1996 by President Farooq Leghari, Mr. Zardari was again arrested on corruption charges.

He remained in prison until November 2004, shuffling among facilities in Lahore, Rawalpindi and his home city of Karachi, always the wheeler dealer, whether in jail or out.

Mr. Zardari was classified as an A class prisoner and received certain privileges: a separate room from the main prison wing with an attached bathroom, air-conditioning and two servants.

A lawyer, Talib Rizvi, who often visited him in jail, said Mr. Zardari always managed to have the best of food, and always seemed in high spirits.

“I had one of my finest lunches in that jail — Asif used to get food from Clifton House,” said Mr. Rizvi, referring to the grand Bhutto family residence in Karachi. “He would get food for 50 people.” Expensive gifts to friends were customary, including gold cufflinks “worth thousands of dollars,” and sets of fountain pens, he said.

And as generous as Mr. Zardari was toward his friends, Mr. Rizvi said, he was as tough against his enemies. Mr. Rizvi said Mr. Zardari offered to organize revenge against assailants who had shot at Mr. Rizvi in the remote area of Baluchistan when he went to defend men charged with the murder of a tribal leader.

Afterward, Mr. Rizvi, who said he regarded himself as a big admirer of Mr. Zardari, recalled: “I said, ‘I am not going to press charges.’ Asif said, ‘I will see to it — I will finish them.’ ” Mr. Rizvi said he advised Mr. Zardari that his offer was not necessary.

After his release from jail in 2004 as part of an early but failed reconciliation effort between the Musharraf government and Ms. Bhutto, Mr. Zardari took up residence in Manhattan, living in the elegant Helmsley Carlton apartment block on 61st Street and Madison Avenue.

Mr. Zardari, attentive to his grooming, which sometimes includes a stylized blackened mustache instead of his natural salt and pepper, has always had a taste for the high life, according to his friends.

Azher Khan, who attended high school with him in a rural area of Sindh Province, said Mr. Zardari was something of a playboy in the early 1970s, and had the advantage of a father who owned the Bambina Cinema, which featured a risqué neon sign.

In the early 1970s, Mr. Zardari went to London. There, he said in the interview, he attended the London School of Business Studies and received a bachelor of education degree. His official biography says he attended a commercial college called Pedinton School. But a search of tertiary educational institutions in London showed no such school, and associates said he did not finish his studies.

The question of whether Mr. Zardari has a university degree is a delicate matter because President Musharraf introduced a law in 2002 that made it compulsory for parliamentary candidates to hold a degree in order to qualify for electoral office.

There are now expectations among his political colleagues and in the Pakistani news media that Mr. Zardari will run for Parliament so he can then assume the post of prime minister.

In the interview, Mr. Zardari said the prime minister’s office did not interest him because it would be “very restrictive.” He wanted, instead, to re-energize the Pakistan Peoples Party.

Asked in the interview if he had a degree, Mr. Zardari replied: “I do have a degree. That is not an issue.” He said he attended the London School of Business Studies “much before I was married. I think it’s a B.Ed. degree. I haven’t really looked at it,” he said, referring to a bachelor of education.

Mr. Zardari, three years younger than Ms. Bhutto, was chosen as her husband by Ms. Bhutto’s mother at the moment when Ms. Bhutto was entering politics. It was considered an unusual match: brainy Oxford and Harvard graduate with a polo-loving, hard-living charmer.

Once Ms. Bhutto came into power, Mr. Zardari was often regarded as a liability in her political career.

Ahmad Mukhtar, who was commerce minister in Ms. Bhutto’s second term and appears to be Mr. Zardari’s favored candidate for prime minister in the new coalition government, recalls telling Ms. Bhutto: “There is propaganda against him, and we get a black name from it. Next time you come to power send him to play polo in Argentina.”

But Mr. Mukhtar said he came to like Mr. Zardari when they shared time together in jail in Karachi. Mr. Mukhtar was arrested in May 2000 by the Musharraf government on charges connected with his tenure as commerce minister. The charges were dropped 17 months later.

Mr. Zardari is one of more than a dozen people accused in a conspiracy in 1996 to kill Ms. Bhutto’s brother, Murtaza, a political opponent of Mr. Zardari and Ms. Bhutto, according to Omar Sial, a lawyer for the family of Mr. Bhutto.

Asked in the interview if he was on bail, Mr. Zardari replied: “That is correct.” And not just in one case, he added, “but I don’t know how many.”

The murder case is still active but has languished for 12 years, because Mr. Zardari and the other defendants, mostly policemen, have failed to show up in court.

“He claims to be grievously ill and says he couldn’t travel,” said Fatima Bhutto, the daughter of Murtaza Bhutto and a critic of Ms. Bhutto and her husband. “Then his wife dies, he turns up fit and fine, perfectly healthy and it seems to be lies.”

Even now that Mr. Zardari is in the country, however, no one here believes the case will be pursued seriously.