Bhutto and spouse sentenced in Switzerland in graft case
Bhutto and spouse sentenced in Switzerland in graft case
Rana Jawad, Agence France-Presse, Islamabad
Swiss authorities have issued former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto and her husband Asif Zardari with a six months' suspended sentence and fined them US$50,000 each in a graft case, their lawyer announced in Islamabad on Tuesday.
"The Swiss Investigation Officer Mr Devaud has on July 31...passed an order pronouncing six months of suspended sentence and a fine of $50,000 each" to Bhutto and Zardari, lawyer and senator Farooq Naek said in a statement.
Naek said the order, the outcome of a five year inquiry into a corruption case involving a contract with Swiss firm SGS, was communicated to the Swiss government on Monday.
The case concerns allegations that Bhutto and Zardari received millions of dollars in private commissions from a Swiss national in return for awarding SGS a contract to inspect imports and exports during Bhutto's second government from 1993 to 1996.
Pakistan's provincial Lahore High Court convicted the couple over the case in 1999, but the conviction was overturned two years later by the Supreme Court, the country's highest judicial body.
The high court ruled the 1999 conviction was biased and ordered a re-trial by the state accountability court.
Bhutto, who has lived in self-imposed exile in London and Dubai since 1998, refused to return to Pakistan for the scheduled re-trial last year and was convicted of absconding.
Naek slammed the Swiss investigator's finding as "malafide and politically motivated."
Bhutto and Zardari, who has been in jail since 1996 on a host of corruption and criminal charges, were consulting legal advisors on whether to appeal the Swiss order, Naek said.
Zardari has only one standing conviction against him, awarded in September last year for receiving commissions in a contract involving the state-owned Pakistan Steel Mills. He was sentenced to seven years jail.
Bhutto is facing up to a dozen graft charges in Pakistan, according to President Pervez Musharraf.
Bhutto has dismissed the Swiss finding as "illogical," Naek said, pointing out that she was never interviewed over the case by Swiss investigators.
"The verdict is illogical and irrational as I was never served in the matter...I was never contacted or summoned in the matter," Naek quoted Bhutto as saying by phone from London.
Naek said the suspended sentence was "illogical, unreasonable, and inconsistent with law."
The original allegations in Pakistan, under the government of Bhutto's rival Nawaz Sharif, included charges that Bhutto and Zardari laundered the millions received in commissions in secret Swiss bank accounts.