Mr. Ten Percent

Asif Ali Zardari, the famously (allegedly) corrupt President of Pakistan, took $4.3 million worth of bribes for helping the French sell three submarines to his country in the mid-1990s, according to a report in the Pakistani press.

The three Agosta 90 submarines were worth roughly $1.24 billion (€825 million), according to the Nation, which cites the ~~Pakistani~~ French daily newspaper Liberation (Français).

It's a little hard to make out the details of how this bit of news surfaced, but it appears that there is an ongoing legal investigation by a French magistrate into a 2002 terrorist attack that killed 11 employees of the French defense company DCN, who were in Karachi working on the subs.

DCN employees who testified in the investigation said that 10 percent of the sale, or €82.5 million, got kicked back to Pakistan, with €49.5 million going to the military and €33 million going to "political circles," according to the Nation. Zardari's nickname, of course, is "Mr. Ten Percent," which he earned for the remarkable amount of corruption he's allegedly been involved in.

Zardari allegedly received $1.3 million in 1994, before the contract for the submarines was signed (or €1.3 million, it's hard to tell because the report inaccurately switches between dollars and euros), then payments of $1.2 million and $1.8 million a year later. All went through Lebanese businessman Abdulrahman Al-Assir and into a Zardari-owned Swiss bank account. During this time, which occurred just a few years before Zardari would be imprisoned on corruption charges, he was serving as a government minister beneath his wife, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

And now for a bit of fourth-hand speculation: According to the Nation, which, remember, is citing Liberation the French media have reported that the magistrate "is now considering the possibility that [the Karachi attack] 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."

How I'd love to be over there reporting this myself.

3 Comments

Muhammad — November 17, 2009 9:16 AM

Please refer to the second para, Liberation is a French newspaper that covered the investigations made by the French Court.
Source: The Daily Dawn dated November 13. 2009 reporter: Samia Mohsin.
It is a factual reporting and no joke, so Mr.Ten % should rest assured. God save Pakistan from all plunderers and looters.

Evan Hill — November 17, 2009 2:20 PM in reply to Muhammad

Muhammad -

Thanks for pointing that out, I've corrected the reference in the post.

Muhammad — November 17, 2009 9:08 PM

My apologies; correct name of the reporter I quoted above is = Saima Mohsin. With some googling i was able to find out that Saima Mohsin is Senior Anchor for Pakistan's first ever English news channel DAWN NEWS. She presents 'News Eye', the channel's flagship nightly news programme. News Eye is one of the most watched nightly program in Pakistan.

As I am out of country, unfortunately, I have not been able to watch Dawn News but it sounds great. Thank you Saima Mohsin for the report. We badly need journalists like you for progress of democracy in the country.