ISLAMABAD, 7 August 2003 — Pakistan said yesterday a Swiss court’s finding that ex-premier Benazir Bhutto and her spouse were guilty of graft was a vindication of the government’s charges of corruption against the pair.
A Swiss magistrate found the couple and their Swiss intermediary guilty of money laundering, handed them a six-month suspended jail sentence and ordered them to return nearly $12 million plus a diamond necklace to Pakistan.
“The Swiss verdict proves beyond any shadow of doubt the loot and plunder of Benazir Bhutto and it is a vindication of what President (Pervez) Musharraf has been saying,” Information Minister Sheikh Rashid told AFP. Musharraf has consistently accused Bhutto and former prime minister Nawaz Sharif of “looting and plundering” Pakistan’s coffers during their terms in power. Both ruled Pakistan twice, Bhutto from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1993 to 1996. She has lived in self-imposed exile in London and Dubai since 1998.
Swiss magistrate Daniel Devaud wrote in his July 30 judgment, made public on Tuesday, that the trio were guilty of arranging an illegal commission worth nearly $12 million for awarding a customs inspection contract to Swiss firms Societe Generale de Surveillance (SGS) and Cotecna in 1994.
He ordered Bhutto and her husband Asif Ali Zardari, a former senator and minister who has been in jail since 1996 on a range of criminal and corruption charges, to repay the Pakistani state the full amount.
Newspapers and analysts declared the Swiss finding a major embarrassment for the former first couple, who have always dismissed corruption allegations against them as politically driven. “It is going to affect her personal popularity back home and in the long run it may prove to be her albatross,” political commentator Mohammad Afzal Niazi said.
The Nation daily called the finding a “major political embarrassment to the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) chairperson as well as to her party.”
“Not just Ms Bhutto but her supporters will have to do a lot of explaining,” it wrote in Wednesday’s editorial.
The judgment was the outcome of a five-year probe initiated under the government of Sharif, now a political ally of Bhutto. Bhutto’s PPP yesterday remained defiant, calling the Swiss decision biased. “The order passed by Devaud is not a court decision and a politically motivated act on his part,” PPP President Makhdoom Amin Fahim told a press conference, accusing Devaud of acting “in collusion” with Pakistani officials. He ruled out any possibility of Bhutto stepping down as party chief. Bhutto’s Geneva-based lawyer Dominique Poncet announced an appeal against the conviction. He told AFP that an appeal would suspend the Swiss investigating magistrates’ decree and could bring the case before a court. Zardari was dealt a second blow yesterday as a court in his home city Karachi indicted him for the 1998 murder of former chairman of the state-run Pakistan Steel Mills, Sajjad Hussain.
Zardari is accused of plotting the shooting of Hussain, who had testified against Zardari in the Pakistani trial of the SGS-Cotecna case earlier that year. Zardari and Bhutto were convicted by a Pakistani provincial court in 1999, but the finding was overturned by the Supreme Court two years later.
