A two-decade campaign by the French state-owned defense giant DCN and
its subsidiaries to sell submarines to the Malaysian Ministry of Defence
has resulted in a long tangle of blackmail, bribery, influence
peddling, misuse of corporate assets and concealment, among other
allegations, according to documents made available to Asia Sentinel.
Some
of the misdeeds appear to have taken place with the knowledge of top
French government officials including then-foreign minister Alain Juppe
and with the consent of former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir
Mohamad, according to the documents, comprising 133 separate files and
hundreds of pages.
They were presented to the French Prosecuting
Magistrate at the Court de Grand Instance de Paris in May and June of
2011. French lawyers have begun preparing subpoenas for leading
Malaysian politicians including Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak, the
current Defense Minister, Ahmad Zahid Hamidi and several other figures.
The
documents were sent anonymously to Asia Sentinel via a circuitous route
that took them to Brussels, Belgium; Lagos, Nigeria; Brazzaville,
Congo; Libreville, Gabon; then to Leipzig, Germany and finally to Hong
Kong.
The documents, written in French, can be found in a collection in Asia Sentinel's Scribd account.
The
documents were compiled as a result of a raid on April 7, 2010, when
scores of investigators from the anti-organized and financial crime unit
of the French Directorate of Judicial Police swooped down on DCN’s
offices at 19 rue du Colonel Pierre Avia in Paris’s 15th Arondissement,
and four other locations, demanding that stunned officials give them
access to safes, files and computers. They collected thousands of
documents that form the bulk of the files delivered to Asia Sentinel.
Together,
they present a damning indictment of Malaysian officials whose goal was
to steer a €114.96 million (US$114.3 million at current exchange rates)
payment through a private company called Perimekar Sdn Bhd, wholly
owned by Abdul Razak Baginda.
Razak Baginda was then the head of
a Malaysian think tank called Malaysian Strategic Research, which was
connected with the United Malays National Organization, the country’s
biggest political party.
The full version can be read on Asia Sentinel.
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