Zardari suspected of graft in submarine sale: Report

Published: November 11, 2009

In 2001, former Pakistani Navy chief-of-staff Mansour Ul-Haq was arrested for his part in the deal and forced to repay 7 million dollars, the daily says.
Legal proceedings against Zardari were dropped in April 2008, several months before he was elected president. However, the husband of the assassinated former Pakistani president Benazir Bhutto was imprisoned from 1997 to 2004 on corruption charges unrelated to this affair.
The Pakistani president is one of his country’s richest men, with a net worth estimated at 1.8 billion dollars.
The ongoing investigation in Paris into the May 8, 2002, terrorist attack that killed 11 DCN employees in Karachi may shed new light on the submarine purchase and his part in it.
The victims were in Karachi to complete work on the three submarines. According to French media, the magistrate looking into the bombing has rejected the theory that it was the work of al-Qaeda.
He is now considering the possibility that it was carried out by Pakistanis, either because only 85 per cent of the agreed kickbacks to politicians had been paid or because of negotiations carried out by French authorities to sell submarines to India, Pakistan’s enemy.
In any case, some French parliamentarians are now demanding to be allowed to look into how the submarine contract with Pakistan was negotiated and executed.

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