A leak from a Swiss bank has revealed that around 1,400 individuals residing in Pakistan are linked with around 600 accounts opened in Credit Suisse.
The average maximum balance in accounts held by Pakistanis was 4.42 million Swiss francs (Rs841 million) compared with the overall average of the leaked data, which stood at 7.5 million Swiss francs (Rs1.42 billion). Almost 200 clients found in the data are worth more than 100 million Swiss francs (Rs19 billion) and more than a dozen had accounts valued in the billions, reports The News.
Senior intelligence officials and their offspring from several countries that cooperated with the United States (US) in the war on terrorism also had money stashed at Credit Suisse.
General Zia-ul-Haq’s closest aide and former Director-General (DG) of the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) General Akhtar Abdur Rahman Khan’s name was also part of the list.
“As the head of the Pakistani intelligence agency, General Akhtar Abdur Rahman Khan helped funnel billions of dollars in cash and other aid from the United States (US) and other countries to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan to support their fight against the Soviet Union,” reports The New York Times (NYT).
According to the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project’s (OCCRP) report, the Saudi Arabian and US funding for mujahideen fighters battling Russia’s presence in Afghanistan would go to the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Swiss bank account. “The end recipient in the process was Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence group (ISI), [at the time] led by Akhtar,” the report said.
“The report states that by the mid-1980s, Akhtar was adept at getting CIA cash into the hands of Afghan jihadists. It was around this time that Credit Suisse accounts were opened in the names of his three sons.”
OCCRP’s report stated that one of the two Akhtar family accounts at Credit Suisse — held jointly by three of Akhtar’s sons — was opened on July 1, 1985. That same year, US President Ronald Reagan would raise concerns about where the money intended for the mujahideen was going. By 2003, this account was worth at least five million Swiss francs ($3.7 million at the time). A second account, opened in January 1986 in Akbar’s name alone, was worth more than 9 million Swiss francs by November 2010 ($9.2 million at the time).”
Two of the general’s sons, Akbar and Haroon Khan, did not respond to requests for comment from the reporting project. In a text message, a third son, Ghazi Khan, called information about the accounts “not correct,” adding, “The content is conjectural.”
