the financial aspect appeal trial opened in Paris

The attack in Karachi, named after the city in Pakistan where it occurred, left 15 dead, including 11 French, and many injured, on May 8, 2002. A first trial took place in 2020 but the six defendants were convicted. had all appealed.

A hearing three decades after the fact. The appeal trial for the non-ministerial financial aspect of the Karachi affair opened on Monday June 3 in Paris. The first two half-days of hearing, Monday and Tuesday, are devoted to procedural debates. Six men are suspected of having played a role in a system of hidden commissions on the sidelines of arms contracts which fueled Edouard Balladur’s presidential campaign in 1995.

This trial, which is due to last until June 20, is a new legal stage in this sprawling affair, which bears the name of the city in Pakistan where an attack occurred on May 8, 2002 which killed 11 French people who worked on the construction of submarines. It takes place four years after the conviction, on June 15, 2020, of the six defendants (an industrialist, two intermediaries and three politicians) to sentences of two to five years in prison, which they all appealed.

At the heart of the matter, colossal commissions, then legal, paid during sales of frigates and submarines in 1994 to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. For the prosecution, the network of intermediaries “network K”, for King in reference to the king of Arabia, was imposed by the political power while he was “useless”. Which resulted in the payment of commissions “exorbitant” to the detriment of two state-owned entities, the international branch of the Naval Construction Directorate (DCNI) and Sofresa.

The intermediary Ziad Takieddine fled France the day before his conviction at first instance in this procedure, which arises in particular from a complaint from victims’ families. He will not be present on Monday, according to his defense. “It’s amazing, we judge the facts thirty years after they took place, we don’t understand this relentlessness”, his lawyer, Elise Arfi, told AFP. The Franco-Lebanese is also at the heart of the case of suspicions of Libyan financing of Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign, whose trial will take place in early 2025.