Daily Times

The worst that was expected of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) was foolproof confirmation that the London flats were bought in early 1990s with tax-evaded money laundered out of the country by Mian Sharif. This would have absolved Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of any wrongdoing and the sons being non-resident Pakistanis and no office holders in the country would perhaps have escaped with some kind of light strictures passed by the three-member Supreme Court Bench.

But what it seems to have unearthed is akin to opening up of a Pandora’s Box. This was beyond the expectations of even those that were expecting a lot of dirt from the JIT investigations against the first family.

The JIT report has, in effect, decimated every documented evidence and undocumented argument of innocence that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his close family members had been employing to cast themselves in roles beyond even a shadow of suspicion.

While complaining about such conspiracies — the complainants have faithfully refrained from disclosing the conspirators’ identity. This has left such complaints sounding more like attempts to confuse the real issue which was and remains accountability

The plethora of evidence that the JIT has generated against the members of the first family makes them closely resemble the characters out of Mario Puzo’s novel ‘Godfather’ and a bunch similar to ‘Sicilian Mafia’ — both the epitaphs used by the Supreme Court judges hearing the Panama Leaks case.

Indeed, the evidence gathered by the JIT against the first family appears so convincing that one felt that the PM has been left with no option but to resign. His resignation, however, would not mean the end of the PML-N’s government. And nor would it mean he has forfeited his right to challenge the veracity of evidence produced by the JIT against him and his family.

But he has not resigned so far and from the way the main stars of his party have responded to the JIT report, it seems that the PM and his family are all set to contest the report in the Supreme Court on Monday with the PM continuing to remain in office. In effect the PML-N leadership has rejected the report as a pack of lies, full of selective facts.

Either one of the two is indulging in white lies or both are dealing in selective facts. The worst that the JIT members would face in case their evidence is proven to be totally misleading is ignominious ending of careers of just six individuals.

However, in case even one small little fraction of the report stood the Supreme Court scrutiny, then it would be the end of the first family politically leading to the collapse of the government and probable decimation of the PML-N as a political party with the country descending into chaos — not a pleasant scenario in view of the multitude of life and death problems that the nation is already facing at the moment.

The vociferous and consistent complaints that a conspiracy has been hatched against the first family and by association against democracy emanating from the main PML-N leadership including the Prime Minister and his daughter Maryam Safdar Nawaz have sounded more like futile but desperate attempts on their part to divert the attention of the masses from the financial wrongdoings that the JIT report alleges the first family has committed.

The fact that while complaining about such conspiracies the complainants have faithfully refrained from disclosing the identity of the conspirators has made these complaints sound more like attempts to confuse the real issue which was and is accountability. Of course, through innuendos they did try to point fingers at the Army or the superior judiciary or a combination of both. But to their misfortune nobody has taken these innuendos seriously.

While still on the subject of conspiracy one would certainly like to know where Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan will stand in the political schism that is bound to appear within the ruling PML-N sooner than later as the heat builds up on the first family. Mr Khan has so far refrained from personally offering public support to the first family. And it was one of the agencies under him, the FIA that has found the SECP chief Hijazi guilty of tampering the records. Also the names of the National Bank Chief Saeed Ahmed and Hijazi would not have appeared on the ECL without his approval. It has also been confirmed that during the hearings conducted by the JIT at the Federal Judicial Academy (FJA)the security of the building was in the hands of the FIA. So, it should not be too difficult for Nisar to find out who leaked Hussain’s picture.

What the JIT is saying in effect is that it did not find any legitimate sources of income of the first family to justify the huge wealth that it has accumulated. If that is true and one were to give one’s imagination a free hand what the JIT is alleging is that this huge wealth of the first family is made up of tainted money that it has been fleecing from the national economy and laundering it out through non-banking channels like Havala and Hundi etc., or perhaps part of it was being collected in hard currency out of the country from those obliged with lucrative domestic contracts and all this money finding its way into a number of offshore companies from where it is whirled around sufficient times to render it white enough to be sent back to the PM as gifts from his sons.

The Prime Minister needs to consider the option of stepping down immediately in the very interest of the country and democracy that he and his family insist that they are trying to protect from the so-called conspirators. He would only be re-enforcing the forces of democracy if he were to step aside and handover the reins of the government to any other PML-N leader of his choice, pending a final ruling by the Supreme Court bench hearing the Panama papers’ case. And one is constrained to add that it would be well neigh impossible for even a person endowed with Churchillian mind to function as prime minister of any country least of all of Pakistan to do justice to his official call while fighting at the same time a legal battle of survival in the face of allegations of massive corruption.

The writer is a senior journalist based in Islamabad. He served as the Executive Editor of Express Tribune until 2014

Published in Daily Times, July 14^th , 2017.