France:Karachi; Sarkozy involved in kickbacks scandal, press
Approved creation of ad hoc company as Budget Minister
The dossier is made more sensitive by the suspicion - which judges are looking into - of a link between France's decision to break off payments to Pakistani intermediaries in 1995 and the May 2002 attack in Karachi, which killed 15 people (11 of whom French).
Tuesday, 3 January 2012
(ANSAmed) - PARIS, JANUARY 2 - French president Nicholas Sarkozy was allegedly involved in the commissioning of arms sales to Pakistan in the 1990s linked to a 2002 attack in Karachi, in which 15 people lost their lives.
According to one of the witnesses questioned during the inquiry, reports today's daily Liberation, in 1994 the Budget Minister (a post held by Sarkozy at the time) allegedly authorised the creation of a company in Luxembourg named ''Heine'' in order to pay intermediaries for armaments contracts (until 2000 a legal practice).
''It is clear that the Budget Minister must have given his approval for the creation of Heine,'' said former high-ranking official of the defence ministry Gerard-Philippe Menayas, according to the minutes of the interrogation quoted by the paper,'' given the importance of the issue, this decision could only have been made at the Cabinet level.''
A 2010 report by Luxembourg police had already spoken of Sarkozy's role in the setting up of Heine, but the president has always denied any involvement. The complex judicial matter of the ''Karachi affair'' aims to establish whether the payments (legal at the time) paid on the side for the contracts finalised in 1994 with Pakistan, for the sale of submarines, and with Saudi Arabia, for the sale of frigates, gave rise to ''back payments'' (illegal): money which secretly returned to France and went towards funding the presidential campaign of former prime minister Edouard Balladur in 1995.
The investigative thesis is that this terrorist attack may have been a form of retaliation by the beneficiaries of the payments. Two figures closely linked to Sarkozy have already been placed under investigation in relation to the case: Thierry Gaubert and Nicolas Bazire, as well as the former minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres.
Posts
