The flamboyant “super minister” son of former Senegalese leader Abdoulaye Wade is to be tried in June for corruption, a judicial source said Thursday, after accumulating a fortune valued at well over $1 billion.
About $95 million of that fortune was reportedly held in a Singapore bank account.
Karim Wade, 45, has been accused to have acquired by corrupt means companies and real estate valued at $1.4 billion (1 billion euros), including land in Dakar, a fleet of luxury cars and media and finance companies operating across Africa.
“Karim Wade will remain in prison and will go on trial in two months for illicit enrichment,” the ministry of justice source told AFP.
Wade, a powerful minister in his father’s cabinet, has been on remand in a Dakar prison for exactly one year since his arrest.
The court extended his pre-trial detention period by six months in October, adding a fresh charge relating to an unexplained sum of $205 million which prosecutors say Wade deposited into several Monaco bank accounts.
Another account in Singapore holding $95 million was also attributed to him this week.
But according to Wade’s lawyers, prosecutors are only accusing their client of illegally accruing 178 million euros, a far cry from previously suggested billion euros.
“This accusation adds up to nothing,” lawyer Mohamed Seydou Diagne told AFP while another lawyer called for a public trial “so that the public gets a full view of the proceedings.”
The judical source said several alleged accomplices are also being pursued, without naming them.
Wade refused last week to answer questions from investigating judges, stating that the “charges against me are political and fanciful”, but he has consistently denied any wrongdoing and said his wealth was acquired legitimately.
“Witch hunt”
On Wednesday, his legal team wrote to complain about “a gross manipulation” of the facts to Jim Yong Kim, the president of the World Bank, which is working with Senegal and other developing countries to regain assets lost to corrupt politicians.
They said their client was being set up as part of a conspiracy ahead of the 2017 presidential elections “with the aim of preventing him from running”.
The former ruling Senegalese Democratic Party (PDS) accuses the regime of Macky Sall, who ended the 12-year rule of Wade’s father in 2012 presidential elections, of conducting a “witch hunt” against the PDS hierarchy since it came to power.
Sall launched a number of audits into the finances of political rivals shortly after his inauguration and several leaders of the Wade regime have been repeatedly questioned by police and judges.
Court officials publicly set out the case against the former minister the day after his arrest, detailing a huge operation involving the movement of money through front organisations in tax havens across the world.
“This is real financial engineering that has been exposed, with frontmen and complex structures. We discovered key sectors of the economy held by offshore companies based in Panama, the British Virgin Islands and Luxembourg,” prosecutor Antoine Diome said.
International playboy
The younger Wade was an extremely divisive figure in Senegalese politics in the run-up to the presidential elections in March 2012, with many believing his father was trying to line him up for succession.
He was often criticised for his mismanagement of public finances and was nicknamed “super minister” and “the minister of the earth and the sky” after his father placed him in charge of the international cooperation, air transport, infrastructure and energy portfolios.
He was seen as an outsider after living for many years in Europe and returning to high profile positions as an adviser to the veteran president and later as a cabinet minister.
Described as haughty and arrogant, Wade led the lifestyle of an international playboy during his years in government, travelling mostly in private jets and frequenting Dakar’s most prestigious restaurants.
He counted among his friends King Mohammed VI of Morocco.
A former financial expert in the City of London, he was adored by his father but unpopular among ordinary people in Senegal, where he was accused of speaking the main national language, Wolof, very poorly.
In a sign of his unpopularity, he was beaten in municipal elections in Dakar in 2009, not even getting a majority of the vote in his local polling station.
The father of three daughters, Wade lost his French-German wife Karine, who was in her 30s, to cancer in the same year.
Story: Malick Rokhy Ba / AFP
Photo: Georges Gobeta / AFP
Reader Interactions