In a bizarre twist to ongoing French judicial investigations into the suspected high-level political corruption and funding scam known as the ‘Karachi affair’, a British thriller writer has now entered the complex plot following a police raid on the offices of France’s state-owned naval defence group, the DCNS.
The Karachi affair centres on the murders in Pakistan of 11 French naval engineers, whose deaths are suspected to be linked to illegal political funding in France via French weapons sales abroad. A judicial investigation into the scam has implicated several close aides to French President Nicolas Sarkozy, along with evidence that raises significant questions about the role of Sarkozy himself (see links to articles bottom of page 3).
Little-known outside France, Percy Kemp, 59, is the successful author of seven novels, including ‘The Boon System’ and ‘Noon Moon’, centred on stories about terrorism. Born in Beirut to a British father and Lebanese mother, Kemp, who writes in French, is regularly fêted by the French media as a master thriller writer, even described by television channel France 3 as “unanimously considered as a true heir to John Le Carré or Graham Greene”.
But beyond his literary activities, Kemp, who studied at Oxford, London University and the Sorbonne in Paris, has a second professional life as a ‘strategic intelligence’ consultant, via a company he founded, called Middle East Tactical Studies.
It was in this capacity that he became involved in the investigation that followed the murders in May 2002 of 11 French naval engineers in a bomb attack on their bus in the Pakistani port city Karachi.
The engineers, employees of the DCN (now the DCNS) were helping with the construction of one of three Agosta attack submarines sold by France to Pakistan in a deal signed in 1994. The engineers were killed in a suicide bomb attack, which both France and Pakistan had initially claimed was the work of terrorists. However, an ongoing Paris-based judicial investigation into their murders, led by Judge Marc Trévidic, has since uncovered strong evidence that the attack was in revenge for the non-payment of bribes, officially described as commissions, promised, during the conclusion of the submarine sale, to a number of Pakistani officials.
This prompted the opening of a second investigation in November 2010, led by judges Renaud Van Ruymbeke and Roger Le Loire, into suspicions that some commissions paid in the submarine sale were used to illegally fund former conservative French Prime Minister Edouard Balladur’s 1995 presidential election campaign. The sums in question are called retro-commissions, which ‘return kickbacks' that never reached local intermediaries but which were re-routed, through complex financial structures, back to France.
Nicolas Sarkozy was, between 1993 and 1995, Balladur’s budget minister and in 1995 became his election campaign spokesman. Balladur ran for president after betraying a pact with his fellow Gaullist RPR party ally Jacques Chirac, the party’s official candidate. Chirac eventually won the election, after which he swiftly acted, in revenge, to cancel the payment of all suspected retro-commissions from weapons deals signed during Balladur’s time in government. It is suspected by Judge Trévidic that this sweeping cancellation of commissions left some Pakistani officials unpaid in promised bribes for the Agosta submarines contract.
Both Balladur and Sarkozy have denied any wrongdoing.
Mediapart has now learnt that, shortly after the engineers’ murders, Percy Kemp was employed as a consultant by the DCN to report on the likely motive for the bomb attack in Karachi. His report, delivered in October 2002, supported the theory that the attack was linked to the non-payment of promised bribes to Pakistani officials.
Mediapart has now learnt that, shortly after the engineers’ murders, Percy Kemp was employed as a consultant by the DCN to report on the likely motive for the bomb attack in Karachi. His report, delivered in October 2002, supported the theory that the attack was linked to the non-payment of promised bribes to Pakistani officials.
This was revealed by evidence found during a police search, ordered by Judge Trévidic, of the Paris offices of the DCNS on May 26th 2010. On the third floor of the building, on the rue Sextius-Michel in Paris 15th arrondissement, the officers from the financial crime investigation division, the Division nationale des investigations financiers, the DNIF, discovered a ‘protected zone’ accessed via a code-locked door within a small office.
There they found documents, hidden in a safe, entitled ‘Percy agreement’, and which contained records of payments to Kemp by the DCN of some 415,000 euros, made over the period 2001-2002. They also came across a folder, entitled P. Kemp’, containing Kemp’s report for the DCN on the Karachi attack, dated October 16th, 2002.
Mediapart has obtained access to a DNIF summary report on the search of the DCN offices, dated July 18th 2011, citing from Kemp’s report, which was entitled ‘DCO21016PAKISTAN’. As transcribed by the police, Kemp’s report recounts that “several sources, including some from the French administration, consider that the Pakistani special services – the ISI – knew and let [it] happen as a vengeance against the DCN which had not fulfilled its engagements concerning commissions”. It then refers to the French domestic intelligence services, the DST (now called the DCRI): “For the DST, this lead is increasingly considered as the most likely. And, in this context, they consider that the risk for the French community remains high.”
During the same period, in the autumn of 2002, the suggestion that the Pakistani security services were involved in exacting revenge against France over the non-payment of secret commissions also figured in another report, entitled Nautilus, commissioned by the DCN from a former DST agent, Claude Thévenet, and which was first revealed by Mediapart in 2008.
Judge Trévidic’s investigation first began focusing on the lead of the non-payment of the bribes after the discovery of Thévenet’s report during a police search of DCN archives. While the magistrate has established that there is no credibility in the theory, officially adopted over several years by the French and Pakistani governments, that the engineers were victims of a terrorist attack mounted by al-Qaeda, he has as yet found no absolute evidence of a financial motive behind the attack.
Mediapart attempted to contact Kemp on Friday January 27th, via the press office of French publishing house Seuil, publishers of his latest novel, Noon Moon. After contacting Kemp with our request for an interview, après officer informed us that Kemp did not wish to make any comment, and that he had never worked for the DCN. However, following Mediapart’s insistence on the substance of its information, Kemp finally called back in person the following day, and agreed to be interviewed.
“I worked for the DCN for years,” he began. Appearing uneasy about the French police discovery, he added: “It makes me pleased that the DCN kept the reports I made.” While admitting that he had met former DST officer Thévenet, author of the Nautilus report, he said he had not discussed the Karachi attack with him.
Kemp said it was important “to minimize” his competence in Pakistani affairs. “What I wrote should not be followed to the letter,” he added. “Perhaps I spoke to someone who knew someone at the DST. At the time, everyone thought it was a question of vengeance. Even the Americans think that there are inadmissible links between certain elements within the Pakistani [secret] services and terrorists. But you know well that there exists a whole world between truth and logic.”
However, in an interview broadcast on a Lebanese television channel in 2005, he underlined the seriousness with which he undertook his work as a consultant. “When I act as a consultant, the duty of truth is required of me,” he said, adding that there was a “very strong resemblance between the spy and the writer”.
In DCN documents discovered by police and relating to its contracts with Kemp there is a reference to work concerning ‘Sawari 2’, the codename for the 1994 deal concluded between France and Saudi Arabia for the sale of three DCN-built Lafayette-class frigates. The deal, agreed by the Balladur government within months of the Agosta submarines sale to Pakistan, is also being investigated by judges Van Ruymbeke and Le Loire over the suspected payment of commissions that were siphoned off to fund Balladur’s presidential election campaign.
Kemp denies any direct involvement in the Sawari 2 sale. He said his work for the DCN with regard to Saudi Arabia came after Sawari 2 and centred on negotiations for the sale of a training ship. “It involved helping the DCN to better understand the Saudi client and to better evaluate the chances [of success] for the project, beyond what [defence and electronics group] Thalès or the French government agreed to tell them.”
Kemp said he had carried out “in depth” consultancy work for the DCN regarding Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, as well as drafting occasional reports for the company on Indonesia, Malaysia, Oman, Kuwait and Brazil.
All the consultancy contracts Kemp signed with the DCN were paid via its shell company in Luxembourg, called Eurolux, and which was managed by Jean-Marie Boivin, a key figure in the ongoing judicial investigations into the suspected political funding scam. Questioned by Mediapart about the payments he received from Eurolux, Kemp said he had been paid significant sums by the DCN.
In 1995, Boivin, who managed Eurolux until 2004, was in charge of spreading the commissions paid during the Agosta submarines sale to Pakistan.
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For more on the background to the issues raised in this interview, click on the links below:
A Q&A guide to the Karachi affair
How the Karachi affair caught up with Nicolas Sarkozy
The Sarkozy aide and his secretly-funded Colombian mansion
Exclusive: British witness in French funding scandal hits back at ‘protected’ arms dealer
The arms dealer and his 'friendly' services for UMP leader Copé
French IT group Bull horned by libyan internet espionage deal
French judge finds key evidence in illegal funding probe
British divorcee becomes key witness in French political funding scandal
Net closes in on French presidency after funding 'scam' arrests
Arms dealer probe brings illegal funding scandal closer to Sarkozy
The secret financier who brings danger to the Sarkozy clan
Sarkozy, the arms dealer, and a secret 350 million-euro commission
The well-connected arms dealer and his tax returns
How Sarkozy aides saved arms dealer from paradise island 'death blow'
Exclusive: how Sarkozy's team sought grace for Gaddafi's murderous henchman
The arms dealer and his Paris party for the glitterati
Exlusive: how President Sarkozy's team dealt with Gaddafi
When Total paid the bill for the Elysée's secret emissary
How French intelligence shields the sarkozy clan's unofficial emissary
Divorce court freezes arms broker's assets
The French-built stealth offroader that may be hiding Gaddafi
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English version: Graham Tearse