Sarkozy’s Karachigate scandal deepens

This video about the Karachigate scandal is called Pakistan: French submarines in murky waters.

From Euronews:

Relatives of Karachi dead want Sarkozy testimony

18/11 16:05 CET

French President Nicolas Sarkozy is facing calls from relatives of those killed in the 2002 Karachi bombing to testify over alleged corruption linked to their deaths.

Lawyers want Sarkozy to address claims made on Wednesday by a former defence minister, Charles Millon, that French officials paid kickbacks to Pakistani authorities on a series of arms deals.

Millon had been appointed by former president Jacques Chirac to stamp out bribery.

When the payments finally stopped years later, it allegedly resulted in the Karachi bombing.

Eleven French nationals died in the attack.

Prosecutors also say a number of officials kept some of the bribe money.

They claim these funds were then channelled through a company set up with Sarkozy’s approval to fund the 1995 presidential campaign of his political mentor Edouard Balladur.

Sarkozy was the spokesman for Balladur’s unsuccessful bid to become president of France.

See also here.

A week after the enactment of his regressive pension reform, imposed in the face of mass strikes and protests, President Nicolas Sarkozy went on TV to lay out his program for the rest of his term. The next presidential election is scheduled for 2012: here.

US legislators have given the green light to a $60 billion (£38bn) arms deal with Saudi Arabia in one of the largest ever single US arms sales: here.

French employers discriminated against people with Muslim-sounding names, the Washington-based National Academy of Sciences concluded in a report on Monday: here.

French police arrested 61 people, including 19 women, in Paris on Saturday for attempting to hold a protest against France’s pending ban on Islamic veils: here.