Zardari to be next president

[Neo]

Switzerland frees $60 million in Zardari's assets​

By Souad Mekhennet
August 28, 2008

FRANKFURT: Switzerland has released millions of dollars in assets belonging to Asif Ali Zardari, a leading Pakistani politician who is expected to be named the country's president next week, Swiss authorities said.

Zardari's accounts were frozen in 1997 at the request of Pakistani authorities investigating allegations that Zardari had received kickbacks while he was a government official and his wife, Benazir Bhutto, was prime minister.

In June, Pakistan's attorney general notified the Swiss that he was no longer investigating Zardari, who leads one of the country's largest political parties.

The attorney general wrote that neither Zardari nor Bhutto had done anything illegal, and that the charges had been politically motivated, the Swiss prosecutor general, Daniel Zappelli, said Wednesday in a telephone interview. As a result, the Swiss dropped a money-laundering case against Zardari and released his assets.

"For money laundering to be proven, you have to show it was the product of a crime, but we don't have any evidence for a crime committed in Pakistan," Zappelli said.

The value of the assets is about $60 million, said a Swiss official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the figure had not been disclosed publicly.

The Swiss action came as a shock to Daniel Devaud, the judge in Geneva who originally investigated the charges. He said it should not be interpreted as a sign of Zardari's innocence.

"It would be very difficult to say that there is nothing in the files that shows there was possibly corruption going on after what I have seen in there," Devaud said in a telephone interview. "After I heard what the general prosecutor said, I have the feeling we are talking about two different cases."

Zardari and Bhutto were suspected of using Swiss bank accounts to launder millions of dollars, allegedly bribes paid by companies seeking customs inspection contracts in Pakistan in the 1990s. Bhutto, who was killed in December, and Zardari always denied the allegations, saying they were politically motivated.

 

[Abraham]

The timing of this is very suspecious.

 

[pkpatriotic]

Swiss judge upset over dropped Zardari probe
Updated at: 2330 PST, Thursday, August 28, 2008
GENEVA: A Swiss judge who investigated Asif Ali Zardari, co-chairman of Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), for alleged money laundering said Thursday he is disappointed the case has been dropped at the request of Pakistani authorities.

Daniel Devaud, the Swiss magistrate who brought charges in 1998 against Zardari and Bhutto, then Pakistan's prime minister, said the probe should have continued, even if Pakistan was no longer interested in pursuing the case.

This week, Geneva prosecutor Daniel Zappelli announced he was dropping any further investigation of Zardari because authorities in Pakistan, where the probe began, were no longer pursuing the case, which they regarded as unneeded and politically motivated.
UNQUOTE

Its really a great disappointment that, either non from media nor any politician raised a question and ask from Nawaz Sharif about the merit of this issue. (As if i may not wrong, the case have been projected by Saifur Rehaman the NAB's chief under NS Premiership)
If it's really proceeded on political rivalary basis then, The amount which have been wasted during case proceedings, should be billed to NS with legal notice that, why he had misuse public money just to take personal political benefits.
Otherwise, he should clarify the facts to reproceed to case, and a charge sheet to the person /authority who has ordered to stop proceedings against Zardari while he had really digested public money.

 

[voiceofumar]

It is incomprehensible, how a man with apparently mediocre financial antecedents, who never put in an hour's honest labour, has been able to amass such a huge fortune.

Every person has a definite right to acquire land & property, but then there should be no reason to deny its ownership, if the concerned transaction is not tainted with graft and corruption.
Property acquired without propriety cannnot be condoned.
And here I am not yet referring to tax evasion , which in any case is a serious crime for a person laying claim to the top slot in the govt.

I have no way of claiming veracity of the information being circulated.

However, not a single Pakistani has any doubt about the Surrey Palace 's ownership by the so-called 'first couple' of this unfortunate land.. Furthermore the proceedings in Spanish and Swiss courts & others have left little doubt about the sustainability of the charges under available evidence.

It is most unfortunate that corrupt judiciary & unscruplous bureaucracy , in collusion with a set of corrupt rulers, have kept such cases in cold storage, to be used as bargaining pieces and manipulating tools.

The ruling elite alongwith the political appointees , related bureaucracy and so-called pillars of the state , are equally responsible for insulting this nation with the NRO in question.

They too must be subjected to stringent scrutiny...and ruthlessly taken to task for their role as agents & facilitators in questionable practices..

I am sure the investigative agencies and journalists will make necessary efforts to indict or exonerate Mr.Zardari and others regarding their acts of omission & commission.
YOU , the people of the media , earn your bread through providing information to the masses.

If you do it objectively ,honestly and with commitment to the nation , the nation shall for ever be in your debt

However , some black sheep , as every body knows are in the pay of respective pressure groups.

In our eyes such embedded journalists are no better than presstitutes, persons on hire to the biggest bidder, their honour, craft and pen for sale at all times.

May God protect us from such miserable creatures.

Please remember that we all are accountable to the nation , and a day will come when we all will have to account for ill gotten wealth & empires built through intimidation, collaboration and collusion with plunderers .

You will indeed be doing this nation a great service ,if you utilise your journalistic skills, information networks and professional contacts to scrutinise such like allegations and keep your countrymen informed of the truth related to persons in key positions- both in private & public domains.


ASSETS AND PROPERTIES OF ASIF ALI ZARDARI (details in the following link)
groups.yahoo.com/group/funchoice/join
Note: The reason to publish the foresaid is the small effore to save the pakistan which is going in the wrong hand, the above informations are correct and there details are proving it,

Please save pakistan

If a person can make the property in the beginning whats the guarranty he will not do against

Please get together to save pakistan

Thanks

 

[pkpatriotic]

Savouring the ultimate irony
Friday, August 29, 2008
by Ayaz Amir

In a land which has always excelled at all kinds of ironies—none more striking than the constant gap between rhetoric and reality—the ultimate irony has to be Asif Ali Zardari as president of the Islamic Republic. Someone more vilified and demonised over the years than even that other target of righteous anger, Gen Yahya Khan, chosen by the flow of events to preside over the breakup of Pakistan.

Who would have thought it? If anyone had predicted six or seven months ago that Mr Zardari was a potential presidential candidate, he would have invited ridicule or been denounced as a fool. Yet, this is what is coming to pass. If this be not the hand of destiny, what is?

From Governor General Ghulam Muhammad (in his last days in power a certified madman) to President Pervez Musharraf—whom we have just got rid of, perhaps only to realise that we may be about to take a jump from the frying pan into the fire—we’ve had quite a collection of heroes as our presidents. Set to join this pantheon is Asif Zardari.

Not the least of the ironies surrounding this imminent development is the circumstance that, although Zardari owes his rise to political prominence to his late wife, Benazir Bhutto, the question of his being considered for president would simply not have arisen had she been alive. The conventional wisdom prevailing in Pakistan People’s Party circles prior to Ms Bhutto’s tragic death was that her interests and those of her party were best served if Mr Zardari was kept away from the spotlight.

But into the spotlight he was thrust when untimely death removed her from the scene, making him the focal point around which the party rallied. He always had his detractors, within the party influential Sindhi politicos who found it hard to stomach the idea of being led by a Zardari (Zardaris not exactly being very high in the hierarchy of Sindhi politics), and outside it others who were in turns appalled and fascinated by his reputation for corruption.

But had he not seized the reins firmly the PPP would have been in trouble. It wasn’t easy filling Benazir Bhutto’s shoes but, on the whole, he managed the transition after her death pretty smoothly and, unlike the PML-N leadership which was torn between the merits of participation and a boycott, was very clear in his mind that the key to moving beyond the Musharraf era lay in election participation. As we can now see, this was the only correct strategy, as Imran Khan, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, Mahmood Achakzai, et al, who took the boycott route to political irrelevance, have opportunity enough to contemplate.

The coalition was a good thing and the PPP and the PML-N were not playing false with each other when they entered into it. It was the strength of the coalition which made government-formation so easy at the centre and in Punjab and the other three provinces. And it was the same factor, amongst others, no doubt, which strengthened Zardaris’s hands, enabling him to pour cold water so easily over Amin Fahim’s overripe ambitions.

The judges’ issue was the rock on which the fragile barque of the coalition has finally split. Zardari has few excuses to make regarding this issue. He shouldn’t have made promises and entered into solemn commitments meant only to be broken. He had his reservations about Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudry right from the start. But he should have been more open about them in his discussions with Nawaz Sharif, instead of following a course of action inviting charges of betrayal and even of treachery, and leading to the first signs of bad blood between the PPP and the PML-N since the elections.

People at large also feel betrayed because it was not for this that they delivered such a kick to the Musharraf order on Feb 18. Any opinion poll would tell us that there was overwhelming support in favour of the coalition surviving and getting a grip on the many problems facing the country. While those problems remain unaddressed conditions are being created for the PPP and the PML-N to go back to the bickering and conflict which was the hallmark of their politics in the 1990s.

Stability, above all, is what Pakistan needs at this juncture. The key to getting rid of Musharraf was the unity of the coalition. The need for this unity has not disappeared. The Americans are breathing down our necks, asking us to “do more” in FATA. We follow this advice blindly and keep chanting the mantra that America’s war is our war, and we risk getting sucked further into a spiral of conflict over which we will have little control. But we can resist this pressure and think priorities out for ourselves only if the two big political parties stay together, at least until the next elections, whenever they come.

Anyway, in the shape of a Zardari presidency the improbable is about to happen, My Lord Saeeduzaman Siddiqui’s candidacy, and friend Mushahid Hussain’s posturing—Mushahid a candidate of Musharraf’s party, the Q League—notwithstanding. For better or worse we will have to live with the consequences of this development. When Ronald Reagan became US president in 1980 there was no shortage of people tending to dismiss him as a B-grade actor. He went on to become one of the most influential presidents of recent times. It won’t do to dismiss Zardari as someone of no consequence, because everything about him should tell us that as president he won’t be a pushover. So it is best to size him up more realistically.

He won Benazir Bhutto’s hand in his own right, which was no mean undertaking. (Someone else trying to woo Ms Bhutto was the Customs officer, Shuja Shah, who, as legend has it, made the fatal mistake of writing to Gen Zia to seek permission to propose to Benazir Bhutto. This he did on the advice of Pir Ali Muhammad Rashdi, Sindhi politician and columnist, who reportedly said that a job in Customs was not worth sacrificing even for a daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. One can only wonder what his thoughts on the subject would be now.)

Living in his wife’s shadow while retaining his own identity—even if that meant nurturing a reputation for cutting sleazy deals and promoting a culture of cronyism—was also not a small achievement. Look also at the way all the charges of corruption against him, most of them reputedly well-grounded, have fallen by the wayside. Even money-laundering charges in Swiss courts, potentially a danger point, have been dropped.

At one time a congressional sub-committee in Washington investigated Zardari’s foreign accounts, Shaukat “Shortcut” Aziz, then in Citibank, also being called upon to testify. All this is documented but the trail has gone cold or has been allowed to get cold. The Americans know all about it. Let’s just hope they don’t have any kind of hold on President-to-be Zardari, because if they do it only further complicates our security situation. A president open to blackmail…takes us into the realm of the unthinkable.

A bad sign about the future is the flourishing of cronyism in Islamabad these days. All those considered the usual suspects in previous PPP dispensations are back in position or are waiting in the wings to make a comeback. What about the reputation for sleaze and corruption? When Chaudry Shujaat and Pervaiz Elahi rose to power under Musharraf I thought this was one family that had no need to make more money. I was proved wrong. Are we about to see another edition of Mr Ten Percent or a break with the past? The jury has to be out on this one.

In the domain of national security we face another danger, and that comes from the American apologists holding key positions in the present government. They range from Hussain Haqqani in Washington to Maj Gen Mahmud Durrani and my friend Interior Adviser Rehman Malik in Islamabad. If they continue to influence decision-making we are in for some more hard times.

 

[Spring Onion]

Bay Adab
Bay Mulahiza
Hoshiar
Beghairate azam
Zaleele Mulk

Sehanshahe Joowaa

Asif Zardari zabardasti aaa raha hain


The SMS is making rounds

 

[A.Rahman]

Mr 10% a thief GOD help us all !!!!!!!!!

This is what people wanted. Enjoy your democracy now

 

[IceCold]

Bay Adab
Bay Mulahiza
Hoshiar
Beghairate azam
Zaleele Mulk

Sehanshahe Joowaa

Asif Zardari zabardasti aaa raha hain


The SMS is making rounds

I got the same as well Lol.

 

[Spring Onion]

I got the same as well Lol.

There is another one

Musharraf tau khoshboo ha hawaaon main bikhar jaye ga
Masala Mulk ka jise Zardari nigal jaye ga

 

[fatman17]

Savouring the ultimate irony
Friday, August 29, 2008
by Ayaz Amir.[/B]

ayaz amir was in the army at the same time i was - we both resigned from the army due to the policies of gen. zia. that is where are similarities end.

ayaz amir was a ppp jiyala - served as 2nd or 3rd secratery in pak embassy in moscow.

became disenchanted by ppp policies and became a journalist esp for DAWN. he was in my opinion a good jurno but kept flip-flopping in his support for the govt. of the day (civilian or military)

now he has won a seat from PML-N. so what ever he says is "baised" in my opinion.

 

[Spring Onion]

ayaz amir was in the army at the same time i was - we both resigned from the army due to the policies of gen. zia. that is where are similarities end.

ayaz amir was a ppp jiyala - served as 2nd or 3rd secratery in pak embassy in moscow.

became disenchanted by ppp policies and became a journalist esp for DAWN. he was in my opinion a good jurno but kept flip-flopping in his support for the govt. of the day (civilian or military)

now he has won a seat from PML-N. so what ever he says is "baised" in my opinion.

A person who has a personal grudge can never be called fair in his views.

Soon after being kicked from Army he started spitting venom against Army and this the area where he wasted his brain if he had one at all in the first place.

Plus if he had objection over policies of Zia he should have come up against him not the entire institution.

I remmber sometimes back when there were floods and after that deadly earth quake this donkey had gathered some people distributed money among them and asked them to call army "Kutay and other names" on Geo TV during his report.

This dog is proven biased.

 

[Neo]

Bay Adab
Bay Mulahiza
Hoshiar
Beghairate azam
Zaleele Mulk

Sehanshahe Joowaa

Asif Zardari zabardasti aaa raha hain


The SMS is making rounds

I got an sms too:
Saray jahan se ganda
Zardaristan hamara
Rehne ko chhat nahi hai
Khula asmaan hamara...

 

[batmannow]

Pakistan’s Presidential Favorite Under Guard


By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: August 29, 2008
Filed at 1:11 p.m. ET
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- Pakistan's presidential front-runner has moved into a tightly guarded government compound over security fears, officials said Friday as a militant campaign against the government led to more violence in the country's volatile northwest.
The party of Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of slain ex-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, has sought to assure the U.S. since Pervez Musharraf's ouster as president that it is committed to battling terrorists.

The country has been hit by a string of suicide bombings this month, including one last week that left 67 dead, many of them civilians.
Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani told reporters Friday that Zardari -- who is widely expected to win a Sept. 6 presidential election by lawmakers -- was staying at a hilltop mansion in Islamabad's government quarters ''for security reasons.''
He did not elaborate, but an intelligence official said there had been reports that the presidential hopeful could be the target of an attack and that he had switched locations after Musharraf's Aug. 18 resignation.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.
Pakistan's 5-month-old civilian government initially sought to calm militant violence by holding peace talks, something Musharraf briefly tried as well.

But it has increasingly intensified military action against al-Qaida- and Taliban-linked militants in the northwest, especially in the tribal regions along the Afghan border -- a rumored hide-out of Osama bin Laden -- reportedly killing hundreds in recent weeks.

Late Friday, the Pakistani army said it had killed ''several'' militants, possibly including a top commander, in a strike in the Swat Valley area, a one-time tourist destination that has been besieged by insurgents.

Major Nasir Ali, a spokesman, did not have an exact death toll but said it was in the double digits. He said F-16 jets were used to pound the militant positions.

Militants have threatened more suicide bombings unless the operations cease. They have hit one of the country's largest military installations, a hospital and a police station in the last week.

Paramilitary troops foiled a suicide attack aimed at a building housing security forces near a vital tunnel in the northwestern region of Kohat on Friday. The troops fired on an explosive-laden car after the driver sped through a checkpoint, said Rasheed Khan, a government official.

Four civilians were killed in the explosion, he said, and 28 people were wounded, most of them security forces.

Suspected militants also blew up two bridges in the area, said Kohat district administrator Mohammad Siraj Khan.
The U.S. worries that violence and political instability that followed Musharraf's resignation after nearly nine years in power would distract the nuclear-armed nation's efforts to fight extremists.
Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, conducted a secret strategy session with Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, Pakistan's army chief, on an aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean this week.

They focused on the problem of militants using the country as a safe haven for cross-border attacks on U.S.-allied troops in Afghanistan, officials said.

 

[mr_attitude]

Dear Pakistanis!
I am suprised to see how dumb we can get? How short can be our memory let me remind us few facts lets start with his criminal record

In 1990, Zardari was arrested on charges of blackmail, based on allegations that he attached a bomb to a Pakistani businessman, Murtaza Bukhari, and forced him to withdraw money from his bank account.[1] However, the charges were dropped when he was released from prison in 1993 when his wife's Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) took power and forced the charges out.[citation needed]

He was kept in custody from 1997 to 2004 on charges ranging from corruption to murder. He was granted bail and released in November 2004 when a judge released Zardari under great pressure. However, he was re-arrested on 21 December 2004 after his failure to attend a hearing in a murder trial in Karachi.

 

[mr_attitude]

Let me begin with his Corruption now
Zardari and Benazir Bhutto denied corruption allegations; however, in August 2004, Zardari finally admitted owning a £4.35m estate in Surrey, England (including a 20-room mansion and two farms on 365 acres, or 1.5 km², of land), which the Pakistani authorities allege was bought with the proceeds of corruption.[2] Legal proceedings brought by the then Government of Pakistan against Zardari to recover the sale proceeds of the property are continuing before the High Court of Justice of England and Wales[citation needed]. In October 2006, the court dismissed Zardari's application to halt the proceedings on the basis that it did not have jurisdiction to hear the case[citation needed]. As of late 2007, Zardari was seeking permission to appeal that decision