NYT had accused Zardari of taking commission in Mirage 2000-5 deal
Monday, January 25, 2010
By Sabir Shah
LAHORE: While a leading French newspaper ‘Liberation’ has very recently alleged President Asif Ali Zardari of receiving kickbacks from a Paris-based naval defense firm Messrs DCN International in September 1994, it was 12 years ago in January 1998 that the New York Times accused him of seeking commissions during the same year from another French company Messrs Dassault in the sale of Mirage fighter planes.
A peek into the New York Times story, “Bhutto clan leaves trail of corruption in Pakistan,” reveals that it was actually the ‘mysterious’ burglary at the Geneva offices of the Bhutto family’s Swiss lawyer Jens Schllegelmilch in 1997 that had led to the surfacing of a string of corruption allegations against late premier Benazir Bhutto and her spouse Asif Zardari, consequently lying the foundation of cases against the duo in Switzerland.
These documents stolen from Swiss Attorney Schllegelmilch’s offices then formed the base of this New York Times story of January 9, 1998, after they were publicised by a US investigative company Messrs Jules Kroll Associates, which was hired shortly before the 1997 polls by the caretaker regime of one of PPP’s founding fathers Malik Meraj Khalid to look for corruption evidence against Benazir Bhutto and Zardari in Europe.
Hired by late Premier Meraj Khalid, under directives from the then President and PPP’s ‘Brutus’ Farooq Leghari, Messrs Jules Kroll Associates then followed the money trail and its findings later helped the second Nawaz Sharif regime to get Benazir and Zardari convicted in Swiss money-laundering cases between 1997 and 1999, though an appeal to set aside the punishment was later accepted by the Swiss court and helped the duo save its blushes.
The New York Times reporter John Burns in his report under review had stated, “Potentially, the most lucrative deal uncovered by these documents involved the effort by Dassault Aviation, the French military contractor, to sell 32 Mirage fighter planes to Pakistan. These were to replace two squadrons of American F-16s whose purchase was blocked when the Bush administration determined in 1990 that Pakistan was covertly developing nuclear weapons.”
John Burns had gone on to write, “In April 1995, Dassault found itself in arm’s length negotiations with Zardari and Amir, a Paris-based lawyer 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 (BCCI).”
The New York Times had further written, “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 per cent to Marleton Business SA, an offshore company controlled by 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 story further read, “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 Legal Affairs Director, and Pierre Chouzenoux, 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 Schlegelmilch only during working hours.”
John Burns further wrote, “The deal reached with 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.”
According to the New York Times, the documents publicized by Jules Kroll also offered intriguing insights into the anxieties that the Cotecna/SGS deal and the ARY Gold Import case had aroused.
The newspaper had gone on to write, “Officials leading the inquiry in Pakistan say that the $100 million they have identified so far is only a small part of a much larger windfall from corrupt activities. They maintain that an inquiry begun in Islamabad immediately after 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.”
On the documents stolen from the offices of Bhutto family’s lawyer in Geneva, the New York Times wrote, “The Pakistani officials say their key break came summer of 1997 when an informer offered to sell documents that appeared to have been taken from the Geneva office of Jens Schlegelmilch, whom Bhutto described as the family’s attorney for more than 20 years. The 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.”
Interestingly, many of the facts narrated by The New York Times in its afore-quoted article of January 9, 1998, were also mentioned by Robert Dougal Watt, the Auditor of the European Court of Auditors at Luxembourg, in his September 2002 letter addressed to the European Ombudsman and Members of the European Parliament.
In his letter, Dougal Watt had stated, “Between 1994 and 1996, executives of both SGS and Cotecna bribed Benazir Bhutto, the then premier of Pakistan, in return for customs collection contracts. In 1997, the office of the Bhutto’s Swiss lawyer was burgled and documents incriminating SGS, Cotecna and Bhuttos were stolen. These documents were subsequently publicized by the private investigation firm, Jules Kroll Associates.”
