Surrey Palace sale will get Zardari £3 million

London, Sept. 22: Only a few legal formalities are left after which the newly-elected Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari would pocket nearly £3 million from the Pakistani exchequer, the sale proceeds of Surrey Palace, the "Rockwood House", which was sold through a liquidator in 2004 after Mr Zardari and his slain spouse Benazir Bhutto were found guilty of corruption.

The total worth of the mansion today is estimated to be around £8.5 million. That sum (£3 million) will add the fortune of Mr Zardari, who had only in August received £32 million in frozen assets released to him by the Swiss authorities, after Geneva prosecutors dropped the money-laundering investigation against Mr Zardari. For more than 10 years, the mansion has been the symbol of corruption charges being levelled against Mr Zardari and his wife Benazir. Spread over an area of 335 acres, the Palace was bought "opaquely" by the Bhutto-Zardari family in 1995 for £2.5 million. The sale, handled by the Bhuttos’ Swiss lawyer, Jens Schlegelmilch, was particularly opaque.

The money came from the Geneva bank accounts of shell companies registered offshore in Panama and the British Virgin Islands.

The purchasers were three Isle of Man firms owned by two local trusts which in turn were controlled by a foundation in Liechtenstein. Suspicions about the true owners surfaced in 1996 with claims that the Bhuttos could have got the estate from the proceeds of corruption. —ANI