French President Nicolas Sarkozy says he wants to clean up the way France sells its weapons abroad. A trial opening in Paris on Monday about alleged arms trafficking to Angola shows why, by exposing corrupt dealings long associated with the arms trade.
It's a high-profile case — but not an isolated one.
In May, a court in Bourges in central France convicted the son of former French Defense Minister Yvon Bourges and a Belgian national of trafficking Iranian arms to Qatar and African countries between 1993 and 2000.
Both cases involved arms that weren't made in France but were sold through deals on French territory.
Deals involving French-made defense equipment have come under question, too.
On Wednesday, after seven years of investigation, a French judge dismissed a corruption case that probed alleged kickbacks in the sal
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The trial of tycoon Arcadi Gaydamak starts today in Paris on charges of illegal arms trafficking, fraud, money laundering, fraudulent receipt and tax evasion. The indictment also states that Gaydamak and his former partner Pierre Falcone gave perks to senior members of the French government to promote their business deals.
As far as is known, Gaydamak will not appear in court, although in the past he has said he would. Gaydamak claims that he is a victim of French political power struggles.
The charges allege that mainly from 1993 to 1995, Falcone and Gaydamak used various intermediaries and sold weapons and ammunition worth $790 million from Russia and Slovakia to Angola, during that country's civil war. They also allegedly established a branch of the Slovak arms company ZTS OSOS without the
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Paris - Forty-two people including the son of late French president Francois Mitterrand and dozens of businessman, politicians and public figures go on trial on Monday over a vast "arms-to-Angola" scandal.
Dubbed "Angolagate" by the French press, the long-running affair has cast a shadow about a raft of senior government officials, including many who served during Mitterrand's two-term Socialist presidency from 1981 to 1995.
It revolves around the trafficking of $790-million (about R573-million) in arms to the southern African country from 1993 to 1998, at the height of a bloody civil war that left half a million civilians dead.
Two businessman, Frenchman Pierre Falcone, 54, and the Russian-born Israeli billionaire Arcady Gaydamak, 56, are at the heart of the case, accused of acting as go-betweens for illegal arms deliveries from easter
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In a blog published Thursday, Josh Silverman, Skype's president, explained he did not realize that TOM-Skype, Skype's partner in China, was logging and storing users' instant messages that were deemed offensive by the Chinese government.
He said the company knew that instant-messaging chats were monitored by the government, as all communications in China are. And he explained that Skype disclosed this to users in 2006, explaining that a text filter was being used to block certain words i
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Skype's president said that the company was largely unaware of a 