Islamabad: Pakistan’s former spy chief and architect of the mujahideen network against the former USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan, has been named one among thousands other high-profile figures from around the world in a massive leak of secret banking data from a leading Swiss bank.
General Akhtar Abdur Rehman Khan was the closest aide of former dictator General Zia-ul-Haq. Both died under mysterious circumstances in a plane crash in 1988.
Khan has figured in a massive leak, dubbed as the ‘SwissLeaks’, which was provided to Süddeutsche Zeitung, a German newspaper, by a whistle-blower, who claimed to have exposed the secret wealth of clients notorious for drug trafficking, money laundering and corruption, the Dawn newspaper reported.
The investigation was heralded by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which has 47 different media outlets across the globe.
They identified accounts identified as potentially problematic holding over USD 8 billion in assets at Credit Suisse.
The data covers accounts that were open from the 1940s until well into the 2010s.
However, it does not cover the bank’s current operations.
Senior intelligence officials and their offspring from several countries that cooperated with the US also had their money stashed at Credit Suisse, a New York Times report said.
“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 US and other countries to the mujahideen in Afghanistan to support their fight against the Soviet Union,” the NYT report said.
According to the newspaper, an account was opened in the name of three of General Akhtar’s sons in 1985, even though Akhtar never faced charges of stealing aid money.
“Years later, the account would grow to hold USD 3.7 million, the leaked records show,” the NYT report said.
An OCCRP report claimed that the Saudi Arabian and US funding for mujahideen fighters battling Russia’s presence in Afghanistan would go to the CIA’s 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 further added that by the mid-1980s, Akhtar was adept at getting the 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 (USD 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 (USD 9.2 million at the time), it said.
However, one of General Khan’s sons told the project’s representative this information was not correct” and conjectural, the Dawn reported.
According to the OCCRP, the data also revealed that 15 intelligence figures from across the world, or their close family members, have held accounts at Credit Suisse.
Credit Suisse said Switzerland’s stringent secrecy laws do not allow it to comment on accusations about individual clients.
Credit Suisse strongly rejects the allegations and inferences about the bank’s purported business practices.
“The matters presented are predominantly historical, in some cases dating as far back as the 1960s, including a time where laws, practices and expectations of financial institutions were very different from where they are now,” the bank said in a statement.
“Furthermore, the accounts of these matters are based on partial, selective information taken out of context, resulting in tendentious interpretations of the bank’s business account,” it added.
The latest leaks follow the Panama Papers in 2016, the Paradise Papers in 2017 and the Pandora Papers last year.
It may lead to more unearthing of secrets of the world’s high-profile figures.