Pakistan People's Party

The Pakistan People's Party (PPP) was the political party of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, prime minister of Pakistan until his overthrow by Zia ul-Haq in 1977, and later of his daughter Benazir Bhutto, its leader until her death in 2007. The military government's White Paper on the 1977 elections named the banker Agha Hasan Abedi as a source of the party's campaign money.¹²

The 1978 White Paper

In July 1978 the Government of Pakistan issued a White Paper on "The Conduct of the General Elections in March 1977." According to the Kerry-Brown Senate report, "in a section analyzing the illegal funding of campaign activities for the PPP, the party of Bhutto, the White Paper describes how 'the other large source of funds was the money brought in by Agha Hasan Abdi [sic]' amounting to 'two or three crores of rupees.'" A later passage described Abedi's "travels . . . loaded as he used to be with bagfuls of money." The White Paper was entered into the record of the Senate hearings on the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (S. Hrg. 102-350, pt. 3, pp. 314-317).¹

Abedi had by then founded BCCI outside Pakistan; the report described the Bhutto government's nationalization of Pakistani banking, which took his United Bank, as the impetus for the new bank. The report stated that Abedi "swiftly changed allegiances" after the coup to Bhutto's successor, Zia, and that Zia "later executed Bhutto for financial crimes, in which Abedi, among others, was clearly involved, while forming close ties to Abedi, on whose financial skills he increasingly relied."¹

Under Zia

Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan in April 1986 after two years of self-imposed exile, "vowing to oust Zia and restore democracy." After dismissing Prime Minister Mohammad Khan Junejo on May 29, 1988, Zia announced on July 20 that elections would be held on November 16, and declared the next day that they would be held on a non-party basis. On August 17, 1988, the day Zia was killed in the crash of his C-130, Benazir Bhutto petitioned the Supreme Court to require the elections to be held on a party basis.³

Government and Dismissal

Benazir Bhutto was prime minister from 1988 to 1990 and from 1993 to 1996.² President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, who had chaired the Pakistani BCCI Foundation through the 1980s, removed her first government, installing an interim government under a deal with Nawaz Sharif in 1990.⁴⁵

On December 27, 2007, while campaigning for elections due on January 8, 2008, Benazir Bhutto was shot and killed as she left a rally in Rawalpindi. Her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, flew in from Dubai to escort her coffin. Protests followed across the country, with eleven deaths reported in "the PPP's heartland province of Sindh."²