WEB DESK – A Paris court has found three former French government officials and three others guilty on charges involving kickbacks from arms sales to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia signed in 1994. The court on Monday handed the men prison sentences of two to five years over the so-called “Karachi affair” that has dogged former Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, who is facing trial on charges that he used the kickbacks to help fund his failed 1995 presidential bid.
These were the first convictions to emerge from the sprawling investigation named after the Pakistani city where a bus carrying French defence engineers was blown up in 2002, killing 15 people.
Al-Qaeda was initially suspected of the attack, but the focus later shifted to the arms deals on suspicions the bombing may have been in retaliation to non-payment of promised bribes.
The three former aides are Nicolas Bazire, Balladur’s former campaign manager; Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, a former adviser to his Minister of Defence Francois Leotard; and Thierry Gaubert, a former aide to then-budget minister, Nicolas Sarkozy.
Bazire and Donnedieu de Vabres were ordered to spend three years in prison, with the court saying Bazire “knew perfectly well” that 10.25 million francs (nearly 1.6 million euros, $1.8m) from dubious sources had landed in Balladur’s campaign accounts.
Gaubert was handed a two-year sentence, as was Dominique Castellan, a former head of the international division of French naval defence contractor DCN (since renamed Naval Group).
Two Lebanese middlemen who allegedly acted as go-betweens for the bribes and kickbacks, Ziad Takieddine and Abdul Rahman El-Assir, were ordered to spend five years in prison.
The two middlemen refused to appear at trial, and warrants have been issued for their arrest.
Balladur, 90, and Leotard, 77, have also been charged in the case. They are to be tried in the coming months by the Court of Justice of the Republic, a tribunal that hears cases of alleged misconduct by government ministers.
What’s the Karachi affair?
Investigations into the so-called “Karachi affair” began after 11 French engineers were killed in a Karachi bombing in 2002.
Pakistani authorities blamed Islamist militants, but there were suspicions that the car bombing, which wrecked a bus, was an act of revenge after then-French President Jacques Chirac ordered the payments of secret arms deal commissions to stop.
Mr Balladur is alleged to have earlier approved payment of the commissions to intermediaries in the sale of three submarines to Pakistan, and that from them so-called “retro-commissions” came back to France to fund his 1995 presidential bid.
The kickbacks are estimated to have cost 13m francs, or almost €2m.
Mr Sarkozy has faced legal scrutiny over the Karachi affair. He has denied any connection to the deal.
A lawyer representing the victims of the deadly Karachi bombing praised the French court’s decision on Monday.
Olivier Morice said that “if the families had not lodged a complaint, there would not have been this judgment”, adding that families were now waiting for the trial of Mr Balladur and Mr Léotard.
Mr Balladur was the French prime minister from 1993 to 1995. Both he and Mr Léotard were charged in May 2017 with “complicity in misuse of corporate assets and concealment” over the Pakistan deal.
