Sarkozy defiant over corruption claims

18 Dec 2009, 9:15 am   -   Source: AAP
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President Nicolas Sarkozy has threatened to sue a lawyer who accused him of involvement in a corrupt deal alleged to have been behind a Pakistan bomb attack.

President Nicolas Sarkozy has threatened to sue a lawyer who accused him of involvement in a corrupt deal alleged to have been behind a Pakistan bomb attack that killed 11 French engineers.

Lawyer Olivier Morice, representing the engineers' families, said Sarkozy was "at the heart" of the deal in which illegal kickbacks were paid as part of a French contract to build submarines for Pakistan.

Relatives of those killed in the May 2002 attack on their bus in Karachi believe Pakistani agents took revenge after a new French government cancelled the kickbacks.

"Olivier Morice has made remarks that directly target the head of state, are libellous, and cannot be condoned as the legitimate expression of the victims' grief," said a statement from the Elysee presidential palace on Thursday.

"The president reserves the right to take legal action and categorically refutes these allegations," it added.

On Monday, six families filed suit in Paris against supporters of former presidential candidate Edouard Balladur, who was prime minister at the time, alleging they also benefited from the deal.

In 1995, Sarkozy was budget minister and government spokesman under Balladur and later became his campaign spokesman when Balladur mounted his bid for the presidency, challenging Jacques Chirac.

"The problem with this case is that Mr Sarkozy is at the heart of the corruption dealings that were approved when he was budget minister" between March 1993 and May 1995, Morice charged Thursday.

"He is at the heart of the case because he was fully aware that this system of shell companies was put in place to receive exorbitant amounts of money that were paid in commissions for no other reason than to finance Balladur's presidential campaign," he said.

In 1995, newly elected president Chirac cancelled the pay-offs, which he believed had funded his rival's campaign, angering Pakistani officers awaiting their share of the graft, according to a report commissioned by France's state naval construction firm, leaked in June.

The families believe they were deceived by the French state and top ranking French and Pakistani political leaders, and that their loved ones were exposed and killed as a result of a sordid political funding scandal.

It is now up to French prosecutors to decide whether to take up the case.

In all, 14 people were killed on May 8, 2002, when a suicide bomber attacked a bus carrying French naval engineers from their Karachi hotel to where they were working on the submarines sold to Pakistan in the suspect deal.

At first, officials in both countries blamed Islamic radicals at war with the West for carrying out the attack, but French counter-terrorism officers have begun privately to accuse Pakistani spies of ordering it.

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