Rights available

The so-called Karachi Affair began on 8th May 2002. On that day, six thousand kilometers from Paris, eleven French engineers and technicians from a naval construction company called DCN were killed by a car bomb in Pakistan. Al-Qaïda was immediately attributed with responsibility. The file was very soon closed for reasons of state, leaving the victim’s families living with lies until a mysterious parallel enquiry - the Nautilus mission - threw the question wide open again six years later.

Like a Russian doll, there was a second scandal nestled within the first. On 21st September 1994, a year before the French presidential elections, Edouard Balladur’s government hastily concluded a deal with Pakistan to sell three submarines constructed by… DCN. The contract’s name: Agosta. Its value: 825 million euros. What was actually hiding behind Agosta was an unthinkable melting pot of international corruption involving a succession of nefarious intermediaries, secret committees, fiscal havens and voracious political appetites.

Two figures keep cropping up at the heart of the intrigue. The first is Asif Ali Zardari, nicknamed “Mr. 10%” in his country and now President of Pakistan. The second is Nicolas Sarkozy, former Minister of Finance in the Balladur government who has now also reached the highest role in his country. Two heads of state who, for differing reasons, are now afraid that an old story will catch up with them, sullying high-ranking politicians in France as well as Pakistan.


After more than two years of enquiries, the authors bring us a wealth of first-hand accounts and previously unpublished documents on an incredible affaire of state teetering between a spy novel and a politico-financial whodunit… except that all of it is true.

A work of many revelations - gleaned in France but also in Switzerland, Luxemburg and Pakistan - that sheds harsh light on international arms sales and their corollary: the covert financing of French political life. The black hole in the French republic.