Benazir Bhutto was charged with corruption and faced a number of legal proceedings (the resolution of which seems to vary depending on opinion) in Pakistan. She has also been charged with laundering state-owned money through Swiss banks, in a case that remains before the Swiss courts. Her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, spent eight years in prison under similar charges of corruption. Kept in solitary confinement, he claims that his time in prison involved torture; human rights groups also claim that Zardari's rights have been violated. Zardari was released from jail in 2004, but Bhutto and her husband continue to face allegations by (among others) the Pakistani government, of having stolen hundreds of millions of dollars by demanding "commissions" on government contracts and tenders. Over the past decade, the couple have faced an approximate combined total of 90 legal cases; while eight cases still remain, Bhutto maintains that the charges levelled against her and her husband are purely politically motivated
A recently released Auditor General of Pakistan (AGP) report presents information suggesting that Benazir Bhutto was ousted from power in 1990 as a result of a witch-hunt approved by then-president Ghulam Ishaq Khan. The AGP report says that Khan had approved a payment of Rs. 28 million to marshal "an army of legal advisors" for the purpose of filing 19 corruption cases against Bhutto and her husband in 1990-92, and was referenced in one of Pakistan's English-language daily newspapers, The News, on the 25th of July, 2006.
A 1998 article in the New York Times indicates that Pakistani investigators have documents that uncover a network of bank accounts all linked to the family's lawyer in Switzerland with Asif Zardari as the principal shareholder in most of these corporations. According to the article, documents released by the French authorities indicated that Zadari offered exclusive rights to Dassault, a French aircraft manufacturer, to replace the air force's fighter jets in exchange for a 5% commission to be paid to a corporation in Switzerland controlled by Zardari. The article also said a Dubai company received an exclusive license to import gold into Pakistan for which Asif Zardari received payments of more than $10M into his Dubai-based Citibank accounts. The owner of the company denied that he had made payments to Zardari and claims the documents were forged. The paper also said that Zardari's parents, who had modest assets at the time of Bhutto's marriage, now own a 355-acre estate south of London. The estate has been auctioned through a court order.
Controversy still surrounds Bhutto - according to The Times a powersharing deal with Musharraf will allower her access to her Swiss bank accounts, containing £740 million ($1.5 Billion). Another one of her prime assets include her 10 bedroom mock tudor Surrey mansion.
Charges of corruption against Benazir in Switzerland
On July 23, 1998, the Switzerland Government handed over documents to the government of Pakistan which relate to corruption allegations against Pakistan's opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto and her husband, Asif Zardari. The documents include a formal charge of money laundering and an indictment by the Swiss authorities against Mr Zardari. The Pakistani government had been conducting wide-ranging inquiry to account for more than $13.7 million frozen by Swiss authorities in 1997 that was allegedly stashed in banks by Bhutto and husband, whom he also asks Pakistan to indict. The Pakistan government recently filed criminal charges against Bhutto in efforts to track down an estimated $1.5 billion she and husband are alleged to have received in kickbacks and commissions in variety of enterprises.
The documents suggest that the money which Zardari is alleged to have laundered was accessible to Benazir Bhutto and had been used to buy a diamond necklace for over $175,000.
However the PPP replied to the assertion that the Swiss authorities have been misled by false evidence provided by Islamabad।
A recently released Auditor General of Pakistan (AGP) report presents information suggesting that Benazir Bhutto was ousted from power in 1990 as a result of a witch-hunt approved by then-president Ghulam Ishaq Khan. The AGP report says that Khan had approved a payment of Rs. 28 million to marshal "an army of legal advisors" for the purpose of filing 19 corruption cases against Bhutto and her husband in 1990-92, and was referenced in one of Pakistan's English-language daily newspapers, The News, on the 25th of July, 2006.
A 1998 article in the New York Times indicates that Pakistani investigators have documents that uncover a network of bank accounts all linked to the family's lawyer in Switzerland with Asif Zardari as the principal shareholder in most of these corporations. According to the article, documents released by the French authorities indicated that Zadari offered exclusive rights to Dassault, a French aircraft manufacturer, to replace the air force's fighter jets in exchange for a 5% commission to be paid to a corporation in Switzerland controlled by Zardari. The article also said a Dubai company received an exclusive license to import gold into Pakistan for which Asif Zardari received payments of more than $10M into his Dubai-based Citibank accounts. The owner of the company denied that he had made payments to Zardari and claims the documents were forged. The paper also said that Zardari's parents, who had modest assets at the time of Bhutto's marriage, now own a 355-acre estate south of London. The estate has been auctioned through a court order.
Controversy still surrounds Bhutto - according to The Times a powersharing deal with Musharraf will allower her access to her Swiss bank accounts, containing £740 million ($1.5 Billion). Another one of her prime assets include her 10 bedroom mock tudor Surrey mansion.
Charges of corruption against Benazir in Switzerland
On July 23, 1998, the Switzerland Government handed over documents to the government of Pakistan which relate to corruption allegations against Pakistan's opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto and her husband, Asif Zardari. The documents include a formal charge of money laundering and an indictment by the Swiss authorities against Mr Zardari. The Pakistani government had been conducting wide-ranging inquiry to account for more than $13.7 million frozen by Swiss authorities in 1997 that was allegedly stashed in banks by Bhutto and husband, whom he also asks Pakistan to indict. The Pakistan government recently filed criminal charges against Bhutto in efforts to track down an estimated $1.5 billion she and husband are alleged to have received in kickbacks and commissions in variety of enterprises.
The documents suggest that the money which Zardari is alleged to have laundered was accessible to Benazir Bhutto and had been used to buy a diamond necklace for over $175,000.
However the PPP replied to the assertion that the Swiss authorities have been misled by false evidence provided by Islamabad।
August 6, 2003, Swiss magistrates found Benazir and her husband guilty of money laundering। They were given six-month suspended jail terms, fined $50,000 each and were ordered to pay $11 million to the Pakistani government। The six-year-long case alleged that Benazir and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, deposited in Swiss accounts $10 million given to them by a Swiss company in exchange for a contract in Pakistan. The couple said they would appeal. The Pakistani investigators say Zardari, opened Citbank account in Geneva in Feb 1995 through which they say he passed some $40 million of the $100 million he received from payoffs from foreign companies doing business in Pakistan.
Charges of corruption against Benazir in Poland
The Polish Government has given Pakistan 500 pages of documentation relating to corruption allegations against Benazir Bhutto and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari nickname of “Mr 10%.” These relate to concerns in the purchase of 8,000 tractors in the 1997 tractor purchase deal. According to Pakistani officials, the Polish papers contain details of illegal commissions paid by the tractor company in return for agreeing to their contract. It is said that the arrangement was initiated and "skimmed" Rs 103 mn rupees ($2 million) in kickbacks from a scheme to make available inexpensive Polish tractors, in a bid to boost farming output, not to the farmers benefit ."The documentary evidence received from Poland confirms the scheme of kickbacks laid out by Asif Zardari and Benazir Bhutto in the name of (the) launching of Awami tractor scheme," APP said. Bhutto and Asif Ali Zardari received 7.15 per cent commission on purchase of tractors through their front men, Jens Schlegelmilch and Didier Plantin of Dargal S.A., who received about $1.969 million for supplying 5,900 Ursus Tractors.
Charges of corruption against Benazir in France
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-16s 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 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. Lodhi's sister, Maleeha, a former Pakistan newspaper editor, became Bhutto's ambassador to the United States in 1994.
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 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 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 Schlegelmilch only during working hours.
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.
"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.
Negotiations on the Mirage contract were within weeks of completion when 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 Bhutto was removed to weigh in against the purchase.
A Dassault spokesman, Jean-Pierre Robillard, said Carrayrou, the legal affairs director, had retired. Two weeks after he was sent a summary of the documents, Robillard said that the company had decided to make no comment.
Charges of corruption against Benazir in Middle East
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 one of Zardari's accounts 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 Emirates sheikdom of Dubai, one of several Citibank accounts used by Zardari.
Pakistan's Arabian Sea coast, stretching from Karachi to the border with Iran, has long been a gold smugglers' haven. Until the beginning of 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.
Shortly after Bhutto returned as prime minister in 1993, a Pakistani bullion trader in Dubai, Abdul Razzak Yaqub, proposed a deal: In return for the exclusive right to import gold, Razzak would help the government regularize the trade.
In January 1994, weeks after Bhutto began her second term, Schlegelmilch established a British Virgin Island company known as Capricorn Trading, SA, with 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 Razzak's company, ARY Traders. Two weeks later, another Citibank deposit slip showed that ARY had paid a further $5 million.
In Nov. 1994, Pakistan's Commerce Ministry wrote to 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, Razzak acknowledged 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 Bhutto and Zardari. But he denied that there had been any secret deal. "I have not paid a single cent to Zardari," he said.
Razzak offered an unusual explanation for the Citibank documents that showed his company paying the $10 million to Zardari, suggesting that someone in Pakistan who wished to destroy his reputation had contrived to have his company wrongly identified as the depositor. "Somebody in the bank has cooperated with my enemies to make false documents," he said.
The Polish Government has given Pakistan 500 pages of documentation relating to corruption allegations against Benazir Bhutto and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari nickname of “Mr 10%.” These relate to concerns in the purchase of 8,000 tractors in the 1997 tractor purchase deal. According to Pakistani officials, the Polish papers contain details of illegal commissions paid by the tractor company in return for agreeing to their contract. It is said that the arrangement was initiated and "skimmed" Rs 103 mn rupees ($2 million) in kickbacks from a scheme to make available inexpensive Polish tractors, in a bid to boost farming output, not to the farmers benefit ."The documentary evidence received from Poland confirms the scheme of kickbacks laid out by Asif Zardari and Benazir Bhutto in the name of (the) launching of Awami tractor scheme," APP said. Bhutto and Asif Ali Zardari received 7.15 per cent commission on purchase of tractors through their front men, Jens Schlegelmilch and Didier Plantin of Dargal S.A., who received about $1.969 million for supplying 5,900 Ursus Tractors.
Charges of corruption against Benazir in France
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-16s 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 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. Lodhi's sister, Maleeha, a former Pakistan newspaper editor, became Bhutto's ambassador to the United States in 1994.
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 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 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 Schlegelmilch only during working hours.
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.
"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.
Negotiations on the Mirage contract were within weeks of completion when 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 Bhutto was removed to weigh in against the purchase.
A Dassault spokesman, Jean-Pierre Robillard, said Carrayrou, the legal affairs director, had retired. Two weeks after he was sent a summary of the documents, Robillard said that the company had decided to make no comment.
Charges of corruption against Benazir in Middle East
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 one of Zardari's accounts 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 Emirates sheikdom of Dubai, one of several Citibank accounts used by Zardari.
Pakistan's Arabian Sea coast, stretching from Karachi to the border with Iran, has long been a gold smugglers' haven. Until the beginning of 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.
Shortly after Bhutto returned as prime minister in 1993, a Pakistani bullion trader in Dubai, Abdul Razzak Yaqub, proposed a deal: In return for the exclusive right to import gold, Razzak would help the government regularize the trade.
In January 1994, weeks after Bhutto began her second term, Schlegelmilch established a British Virgin Island company known as Capricorn Trading, SA, with 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 Razzak's company, ARY Traders. Two weeks later, another Citibank deposit slip showed that ARY had paid a further $5 million.
In Nov. 1994, Pakistan's Commerce Ministry wrote to 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, Razzak acknowledged 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 Bhutto and Zardari. But he denied that there had been any secret deal. "I have not paid a single cent to Zardari," he said.
Razzak offered an unusual explanation for the Citibank documents that showed his company paying the $10 million to Zardari, suggesting that someone in Pakistan who wished to destroy his reputation had contrived to have his company wrongly identified as the depositor. "Somebody in the bank has cooperated with my enemies to make false documents," he said.
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