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| Saturday, 24 April 2004 |
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Musharraf asks foreign banks to return Pakistan's "looted wealth" Pakistan, Friday (AFP) Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf on Thursday urged foreign banks to return billions of dollars he said had been stolen by the Islamic republic's former "corrupt" leaders. "The biggest chunk of corruption in Pakistan has been by the leaders themselves, they have been looting the wealth and stashing it in western banks, off-shore accounts, Swiss accounts," Musharraf said at the closing session of a three-day international conference on corruption. "Western banks are flourishing on this money. Billions of (our) dollars are lying in your (western) banks, give them back to us." The president did not name the leaders but he has frequently accused former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif of "looting and plundering" Pakistan's coffers. Bhutto and Sharif both ruled twice in the 11 years of democratically-elected governments between the military regimes of general Zia ul-Haq, whose reign ended when he died in a plane crash in 1988, and Musharraf's 1999 coup. His comments come after a Swiss court's summons of Bhutto and her husband Asif Ali Zardari, to appear for an appeal against their conviction in Geneva last year in a 12 million dollar money laundering case. A Geneva magistrate found the pair had stashed the money, obtained through bribes from a Swiss company for a freight checking contract in the mid-1990s, in Swiss bank accounts. He ordered them to repay 2.4 million dollars to the Pakistani government. The appeal was postponed from this week after Zardari said he was too ill to travel to Switzerland. The government says Bhutto herself also told the Swiss court she was too ill. Bhutto's supporters in Pakistan refused to confirm or deny that she pleaded illness. The Swiss conviction was the first time the disgraced former first couple have been found guilty outside of Pakistan. A graft conviction against the pair by a Pakistani court in 1998 was overturned two years later on appeal. |
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