A French court slapped jail terms on Tuesday on the main players in a network that smuggled arms to war-torn Angola and included a former minister and the son of the late president Francois Mitterrand.
Russian-Israeli tycoon Arkady Gaydamak was convicted in absentia for organizing the 1990s arms sales and sentenced to six years in jail at the trial that exposed a ring of corruption at the highest levels of Paris politics.
The huge Soviet-made arsenal that fueled Angola’s grim civil war included 420 tanks, 150,000 shells, 170,000 anti-personnel mines, 12 helicopters and six warships amd was worth US$790 million.
Only six of the 42 defendants were acquitted in the trial dubbed “Angolagate” that began last October after years of complex investigations.
“Rarely have we reached such levels in the organization and the dissimulation of criminality generating considerable profits,” Judge Jean-Baptiste Parlos said as the verdicts were handed down.
He described Gaydamak, 57, as someone who “behind the mask of worthiness ... scoffs at borders, laws and justice.”
French businessman Pierre Falcone, 55, was also sentenced to six years in jail for his role in the illegal trade and was immediately taken into custody by police at the courtroom, despite his plans to appeal.
Former interior minister Charles Pasqua, 82, was ordered jailed for a year, plus two more years suspended, and fined 100,000 euros (US$150,000). Now a French senator, he was not in court but his lawyers said he intended to appeal.
In a TV interview with France 2, Pasqua said that Mitterrand knew that weapons were being sold to the Angolans.
“The president was aware of the sale of arms to Angola. The prime minister was aware, most ministers too ... I think the time has come to put the record straight,” he said.
Jean-Christophe Mitterrand, 62, who was an adviser on Africa to his president father, was given a two-year suspended sentence and a 375,000 euro fine for receiving embezzled funds from the illegal arms sales to Angola.
He accepted millions of euros in “consultant fees” on the sale of the weapons to President Eduardo Dos Santos’s regime for use in the 1979-2002 bush war against UNITA rebels.
The arms originated in the former Soviet bloc and were sent to Africa in breach of French law through a French-based firm and its eastern European subsidiary.
Sales began when Mitterrand, a socialist, was in power in 1993 and continued until 1998, three years after conservative Jacques Chirac’s election.
Although no Angolan officials were indicted, court papers alleged that Dos Santos and his inner circle received millions of dollars in kickbacks.
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