Paris (AFP)
In mid-July, Attorney General François Molins requested former Prime Minister Edouard Balladur and his former minister François Léotard to be transferred to the Court of Justice of the Republic (CJR) in the financial part of the Karachi affair. AFP learned Friday from judicial source, confirming information from the Express.
It is now up to the RGC's board of inquiry to decide whether or not to hold the two men accountable for the possible hidden financing of Balladur's 1995 presidential campaign, via retrocommissions revealed in the investigation into the Karachi attack in 2002.
On May 7, after five years of investigation, the investigation commission had transmitted the file to the public prosecutor's office of the Court of Cassation for Mr. Molins to take his requisitions.
The RGC is the only body authorized to try members of the government for acts committed in the exercise of their functions, but its very existence is suspended.
The two former state clerks have been indicted since 2017 for "complicity in the abuse of social good".
"I was not aware of anything about the existence of commissions, retro-commissions, (...) informal networks and other officials," defended Mr. Balladur, heard five times more than 20 years after the fact, according to one of his interrogations revealed by AFP.
He is also suspected of "receiving".
The Karachi affair owes its name to the attack of May 8, 2002 that had killed fifteen, including eleven French employees of the Directorate of shipyards (ex-DCN), and wounded twelve others in the Pakistani city. All worked on the construction of one of the three Agosta submarines sold to this country, under the Balladur government (1993-1995).
In parallel, the antiterrorist investigation, which initially privileged the track of Al-Qaeda, explored since 2009 the thesis - not confirmed - of retaliation with the decision of Jacques Chirac, assassin Edouard Balladur in the presidential, to stop the payment of commissions in these contracts after his election.
In digging this hypothesis, the magistrates had acquired the conviction that Mr. Balladur's campaign accounts, although validated, had been partly financed by illegal rebates, amounting to 13 million francs (nearly 2 million euros). euros), in addition to submarine contracts in Pakistan and frigates in Saudi Arabia (Sawari II).
This financial aspect has also led to the trial in correctional, next month in Paris, of six protagonists, including Thierry Gaubert (former member of the cabinet of Nicolas Sarkozy then Budget Minister), Nicolas Bazire, director of the balladurienne campaign, and the intermediary Ziad Takieddine.
© 2019 AFP