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 .
The commission of the instruction of the RGC must decide
It is now up to the RGC's board of inquiry to decide whether or not to judge the two men for their responsibility in the possible hidden financing of Edouard 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 committee had sent the file to the public prosecutor's office of the Court of Cassation for François 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," had defended Edouard Balladur, heard five times over 20 years after the facts, according to one of his interrogations revealed by AFP. He is also suspected of "receiving".
Already a lawsuit in the financial part
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 the campaign accounts of Edouard Balladur, although validated, had been partly financed by retrocommissions - illegal - up to 13 million francs (nearly 2 million). 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.