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paid]
suggest that these payments are secret commissions paid by
the DCN-I [the commercial arm of the submarine builders DCN]
to Monsieur Zardari and Monsieur Lodhi for their
considerable service in assuring that DCN-I got the
contract".
Huge sums are
recorded at the end of 1994 alone, when a company called
Marleton Business Inc. was set up through a lawyer in the
tax haven of the British Virgin Islands for use by Zardari.
A first payment of some of 5.5 million francs (about 838,000
euros) took place in October 1994 "of which 70% goes to
Monsieur Zardari (AAZ) and 30% to Monsieur Lodhi (AL),"
noted the French police report.
Sarkozy's ministry 'approved' bribe sums
A second
transfer took place two months later, in December, for an
altogether larger sum of 59.48 million francs, (about 9.06
million euros) "divided into 41.636 million [francs] for
Monsieur Zardari and 17.844 million for Monsieur Lodhi".
That represented 6,934,296 euros for the current president
of Pakistan, and 2,971,841 euros for his partner.
According to
the French investigators, the official Pakistani documents
seized in Lohdi's Paris home also explain that "Messieurs
Lodhi and Zardari received their bribes in the bank accounts
of a series of offshore companies".
The report says
they are all based in the Virgin Islands and they are
identified by the DNIF as: Marvil Associated Inc., Penbury
Finance, Oxton Trading, Crimities Holding and Dustan
Trading.
The banks
involved in the payments were also recorded in the Pakistani
documents, as well as the bank accounts used. "The
commissions paid into the accounts, notably opened by these
companies at the Pasche bank and the bank of Piguet et Cie,
in Switzerland, were probably supplied by transfer from the
Banque française du Commerce extérieur [French bank of
Foreign Trade], account number 2700 0008358 or
IV10000083580."
Several
high-profile witnesses questioned in November and December
2010 by judge Van Ruymbeke have insisted that the bribes
paid in 1994 were perfectly legal and were approved by
France's then-defence minister, François Leotard, and its
budget minister, now France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy.
In a statement
he gave to Van Ruymbeke on November 9th, 2010, former DCN-I
finance director, Gérard-Philippe Menayas, said "the total
volume of the commissions was validated, contract by
contract, by the ministers of the budget and defence."
In a statement
given to judge Van Ruymbeke on December 7th, 2010, Jacques
Dewatre, who in 1994 was head of the French foreign
intelligence service, now called the DGSE, testified that
"The approval for commissions is the responsibility of
services which depend upon the Minister of Defence and the
Minister of the Budget."
Mediapart has
learnt Van Ruymbeke's investigation has already established
that, in order to convince the Pakistani authorities to
choose the French submarines, a very structured network of
corruption was established by a French state company
dedicated to such activities. This was the Société française
de matériels d'armement, the SOFMA, which partnered the
designers and builders of the submarines, the DCN.
Van Ruymbeke
has evidence that the SOFMA set aside the equivalent in
francs of 51.6 million euros for bribes to be paid out in
the Pakistan deal.
Influential
agents working with the SOFMA used the money to gain the
favours of numerous Pakistani dignitaries, in both military
and political spheres. While the practice of commission
payments was then legal for France, the reception of bribes
was illegal in Pakistan.
Asif Ali
Zardari was one of the main benefactors of the paid bribes,
according to a former SOFMA managing director, Henri Guittet.
He evaluated the sum paid to Zardari as being 4% of the
total value of the sales contract, which amounts to a value
of 33 million euros."I believe there was one per cent paid
upon the signature of the sales contract, which means at the
moment when everything can get underway and when notably the
deposit and [partial] down payment has been paid, and one
per cent later," he said in a formal statement. "The
remaining two per cent was pro rata with the payment of the
clients."
But French
judicial investigators are investigating whether the Agosta
contract also involved illegal payments in France. It was in
the summer of 1994, despite the fact that negotiations with
Pakistan over the sale were already successfully concluded,
that the government of then-prime minister Edouard Balladour
imposed two Lebanese intermediaries in the contract, Ziad
Takieddine and Abdulrahman El-Assir.
They were
promised supplemantary commission payments worth more than
30 million euros. Both judge Van Ruymbeke and judge Marc
Trévedic, who is heading investigations into the murders of
the French engineers, have collected evidence suggesting
that part of the supplementary commissions was destined for
Balladur's 1995 presidential election campaign.
Trévedic's
investigation has discarded the theory touted by the
Pakistani authorities that the engineers were targeted by
al-Qaida. He is now centring on suspicions that the bomb
attack was directly or indirectly linked to the secret
financial arrangements surrounding the Agosta deal. More
precisely, that it was in retaliation for the non-payment of
commissions promised to Pakistanis after they were all
blocked by Balladur's rival Jacques Chirac, after he won the
1995 elections.(Mediapart) |
