According to the French online daily Mediapart, Luxembourg police have found that in 1994 Sarkozy, then budget minister under Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, set up an illegal offshore company to help finance his boss's upcoming presidential campaign.
Called Heine, the Luxembourg-based company was allegedly used to pay bribes to intermediaries in overseas arms sales by the French naval defence company DCN and funnel kickbacks from those deals back to France. While paying bribes to foreign agents was legal at the time, kickbacks - or retro-commissions, as they are called here - were not.
"According to a document, the agreements on the creation of (Heine) appear to come directly from Prime Minister Balladur and Finance Minister Nicolas Sarkozy," the Luxembourg police file reportedly says, misidentifying Sarkozy's post...
...when Chirac became president, he immediately shut down Balladur's alleged bribe-and-kickback system, leaving about 15 percent of the Pakistani bribes unpaid. Judges now believe that the Karachi bombing was a retaliation for non-payment of the bribes.
http://www.zeenews.com/news631522.html 
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