Foreign banks asked to return looted wealth, Musharraf addresses closing session of moot on corruption

President Pervez Musharraf on Thursday urged foreign banks to return billions of dollars, he said, had been stolen by the Islamic republic's former 'corrupt' leaders.
"The biggest chunk of corruption in Pakistan has been by the leaders themselves, they have been looting the wealth and stashing it in western banks, off-shore accounts, Swiss accounts," Musharraf said at the closing session of a three-day international conference on corruption.
"Western banks are flourishing on this money. Billions of (our) dollars are lying in your (western) banks, give them back to us."
The president did not name the leaders but he has frequently accused former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif of "looting and plundering" Pakistan's coffers.
His comments come after a Swiss court's summons of Benazir and her husband Asif Ali Zardari, to appear for an appeal against their conviction in Geneva last year in a $12 million money laundering case.
A Geneva magistrate found the pair had stashed the money, obtained through bribes from a Swiss company for a freight checking contract in the mid-1990s, in Swiss bank accounts.
He ordered them to repay $2.4 million to the Pakistani government.
The appeal was postponed from this week after Zardari said he was too ill to travel to Switzerland. The government says Benazir herself also told the Swiss court she was too ill. Benazir's supporters in Pakistan refused to confirm or deny that she pleaded illness.
The Swiss conviction was the first time the disgraced former first couple has been found guilty outside of Pakistan. A graft conviction against the pair by a Pakistani court in 1998 was overturned two years later on appeal.
Musharraf said money laundering was "the main source of corruption in developing countries.
"We have to deny this stashing and work to get this money back with a pioneering zeal."
Musharraf said the National Accountability Bureau had recovered some $ 3 billion in its pursuit of 165 politicians, 12 military officers, 34 bureaucrats, 81 businessmen and 51 others.
"The national exchequer gained $ 3 billion due to NAB and that is their success," he said, adding that a corruption-free society was "a mirage almost impossible to achieve".
Musharraf said "many corrupt" politicians were elected in October 2002 elections "with vast margins, therefore, they play a role in governance."
He was referring to ruling party leaders and allies who were under investigation for graft before they accepted seats in the Parliament lucrative ministries.
Transparency International, a graft watchdog, ranked Pakistan 92 in a list of 133 countries ranked according to perceptions of corruption, with Finland at number one as the least corrupt and Bangladesh at 133 as the most corrupt.