Records of Zardari’s Swiss graft case brought to Pakistan

ISLAMABAD - A two-member team of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) returned here Thursday with the voluminous records relating to a $60 million Swiss money laundering case against Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari that has been reopened after the Supreme Court struck down an amnesty against graft.

The team returned from London with a bulky bag containing the records that were handed over to the NAB through the foreign office.

Pakistan’s high commissioner in London Wajid Shams ul Hassan had taken custody of the records after a Geneva court closed the case in August 2008 at the request of the Pakistani government and released $60 million that was frozen in Swiss accounts.

Zardari’s case, along with 157 others, has been reopened after the Supreme Court last December struck down an amnesty against graft then president Pervez Musharraf had granted through an ordinance promulgated in October 2007.

The amnesty, in the form of the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO), was promulgated primarily to enable former prime minister Benazir Bhutto and her husband Zardari, who faced a slew of corruption cases, to return home from self-imposed exile.

Bhutto was assassinated in a gun and bomb attack as she left a political rally in the adjacent garrison town of Rawalpindi December 27, 2007.

A host of other politicians, retired army officers and bureaucrats had also benefited from the NRO.

On Wednesday, the NAB informed the Supreme Court that it has written to the Swiss authorities to reopen the case against Zardari.