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Paris and ourselves. The Attorney General has intervened in
UK/France extradition cases before and informal soundings
taken of his officials by ourselves and by Paris suggest he
may well be prepared to take this on. We did approach the
Attorney General's office last November to ask him to make
representations on Saniman in the course of a meeting with
the then French Minister of Justice, but he was concerned
that this might cut across representations he was making on
another case (Akbar, now resolved).
4.
Requests by the Hong Kong government for extradition of Dr Saniman stem from allegations of conspiracy to defraud and accepting corrupt payments on a massive scale; this is the largest fraud case ever in Hong Kong. Dr Saniman, a Malay
national now resident in France, was a director in the same
company as Lorrain Osman, who was extradited to Hong Kong earlier this year after a long drawn out legal process. Hong Kong Government have been pursuing the case of Dr
Saniman through the French courts since 1986 and are very
keen to see him stand trial.
The
5.
The Hong Kong Attorney General has particularly requested
HMG's assistance in pursuing this case in part to lend
stature to Hong Kong's legal representations (the French tend
to discount Hong Kong's competence to pursue the case through
the courts and HMG's association with the legal process has
been much appreciated by Hong Kong. In May 1992 Ministers agreed to support Hong Kong's efforts to seek administrative
redress in France when these started running into
difficulties. Briefly, a first request in November 1987 for
extradition was refused; a second request in October 1990 was responded to by a recommendation that Dr Saniman be
extradited. His appeal against this decision was rejected on
30 March 1991, but the Ministry of Justice decided in
February 1992 to overturn the extradition decision.
It was
sani.min JM BRIEF
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