Islamabad, Aug 07: Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party has charged the government with influencing the Swiss investigating officer, who awarded a six-month suspended sentence to the former premier and her husband Asif Zardari for "laundering" USD 11 million through Swiss bank accounts. Though he did not spell out the mode of influence exercised by the government, PPP deputy secretary general Mian Raza Rabbani told reporters in Karachi it would emerge from an inquiry how much the establishment spent on this case for maligning the PPP leadership.
Asked whether President Pervez Musharraf was involved in the process, Rabbani said, "This is an old and dormant matter. It was reactivated after Musharraf's foreign visit. So you can draw your own conclusion." Once an appeal is filed against the alleged malafide order of the Swiss officer in the case, the question of pursuing a defamation case against him would be looked into, Rabbani was quoted as saying by an English daily.
When asked to substantiate his contention that the order was malafide, the PPP leader said Bhutto's lawyers had stated before the supreme court that the concerned Swiss official had been providing blank attested papers to the former Ehtesab (accountability) Bureau. Though the government has alleged that Bhutto and her husband had several Swiss accounts, he claimed that not a single one has yet been identified. Bureau Report