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Benazir's Judgement Day

I am innocent, I am innocent," is the refrain of Benazir Bhutto's defence, as the Ehtesab Bureau, like India's CBI, unfolds charge after charge of corruption against her. What has hurt her most is the appearance of cases as advertisements in leading English and Urdu newspapers in Pakistan.

Normally, the EB should not use public funds for such a purpose. It does amount to building popular opinion against Benazir before the courts have given their verdict. Her Pakistan People's Party is correct in demanding that the government should dissociate itself from the EB campaign if it wants the opposition's support in any matter.

But there is another side to the story. The EB has done a tremendous job in collecting evidence against Benazir and her husband, Asif Zardari, in the US, the UK, Switzerland, Poland and elsewhere. There is a string of cases to show how the two misused the government machinery to amass assets, which exceed Rs 7 billion in the cases investigated so far. The agency may have been over-enthusiastic in blowing its own trumpet. But the point at issue is not advertisements but their contents. They are indefensible.

EB investigators have asked the US government to help it verify the allegation that a Rs 40 million stud farm, beach houses in Florida and a hotel in Texas were bought on Benazir's behalf by money "generated from the corrupt plundering of her country's wealth." A parallel request has been lodged with the British government to find out whether she spent some Rs 800 million on seven flats and houses she bought in and around London.

The most lavish of the seven properties listed in Britain is a Rs 160 million estate in Surrey. Benazir has said she doesn't even own "a hat in London" and that she is the victim of a politically motivated smear campaign. "The government has resorted to a media trial against me after failing to prove cases in the courts," she said a few days ago. The evidence produced tells a different tale.

The most serious allegation that EB wants Britain to investigate concerns heroin smuggling. The home office in London has reportedly agreed to look at Zardari's British bank account after Pakistani officials said they could prove his links to drugs smuggling. Last year, key witnesses were investigated in a British court but their testimonies have not been released and no charges have been brought.

The Pakistani authorities say the London properties are a fraction of the huge pot of wealth she and her husband collected during their years in power. They say the investments spread across nine countries are worth more than Rs 7 billion. (Her assets in Pakistan are frozen and her family's financial empire is being investigated in Britain, the US and Switzerland, where a judge has frozen several bank accounts.)

When Benazir was prime minister, Zardari was known as 'Mr Five Per Cent' for the kickbacks and bribes he allegedly demanded for government contracts that ranged from the purchase of aircraft to gold imports. One of the deals under investigation in the Pakistani courts includes a contract with a Swiss firm to improve customs procedures in Pakistan. Another concerns the kickbacks from a Polish tractor manufacturer. Zardari is also said to be at the centre of a smuggling ring that arranged for antiquities worth millions of rupees from Kabul to be sold to art collectors in the West.

The millions that Benazir and Zardari stashed away, according to the EB investigators, were siphoned off into offshore bank accounts and companies. One of the offshore companies, the Pakistan government claims, was used to buy the fabulous Rs 160 million Rockwood Estate near Godalming in the English countryside. Benazir and her husband deny that they are the owners of this 26-acre mansion with its private airstrip. But their detractors say there are documents to prove that Zardari bought the property through an offshore company registered in the Isle of Man.

The investigators must have produced irrefutable proof because they have even persuaded a Swiss judge to impound a safe deposit box in Geneva in which, according to the investigators, she had a diamond necklace, a ruby brooch and emerald earrings, valued around Rs 10 million. This jewellery was paid for in cash, with the money transferred from another offshore company. This was set up on Benazir and Zardari's behalf.

While the various charges are at different stages of culmination, the one relating to the Swiss court has reached a point that may make or mar the entire EB's work or Benazir's future. The Rawalpindi bench of the Lahore high court has constituted a commission to ascertain the validity of documents provided by the Swiss court about corruption charges. If they are found false, the EB may have no face to pursue the other charges. In case the documents are proved authentic, Benazir's wailing will be of no avail.

The Nawaz Sharief government has won the first round in a way. Law Minister Khalid Anwar said in the Pakistan senate the other day that Benazir should send a letter to the Swiss court saying that the bank accounts brought into the open by the EB did not belong to her. He further suggested she should write to the court to say that she would have no objection if the accounts were transferred to the people of Pakistan.

In reply, her former home minister Altzaz Hasan said it could be done provided the advertisements were stopped. This is no reply. The point involved is that of authenticity of the bank accounts. No amount of advertisements can make them a reality if they do not exit. And all the propaganda against Benazir would fall flat if she could prove that the Swiss accounts were not hers.

Despite the gravity of allegations, the EB has so far failed to jail Benazir. She is out on bail and is free to travel from Pakistan to London and Dubai, where some of her wealth is said to be stashed and where her three children are now in school. Ironically, hundreds of thousands of her supporters, living in poverty in Pakistan, refuse to condemn the luxurious life she leads.

True, the focus of EB's inquiry is Zardari. He is in prison awaiting trial for the murder of his wife's brother, Murtaza Ali Bhutto. It is alleged that he was killed when he tried to take over some of Zardari's "lucrative business." The personal rivalry between the two was an open secret. Whether the charge brought against Zardari is true or not will be known if and when the court gives the verdict.

But the instances of corruption, as spelled out by the EB, are independent of whatever else is proven or not against Zardari. His reputation is so bad that every dishonest deal attributed to him is considered true. Benazir will begin to evoke sympathy if the charges of property and money held abroad are proved false. Only then will she sound credible that she is innocent.

Kuldip Nayar