Daily Times

At a time when the nation is still struggling to digest the fallout of the Broadsheet revelations, news reports of the cabinet green-lighting payment of Rs84 million (GBP385,000) to a foreign firm to pursue cases against former Mutahidda Qaumi Movement (MQM) chief Altaf Hussain have been shoved down its throat. It turns out that the government engaged the services of British law firm M/s Guernica International for one year (Feb 2018 to Feb 2019) for cases against the one-time MQM supremo like Dr Imran Farooq’s murder, money laundering and incitement of violence.

Now it is a little troubling, especially considering all that has come to light very recently, that not only did the deadline pass without much progress and there are liabilities outstanding, but also that audit reports found that engagement of the international law firm was not done in compliance with procurement rules and it had not been processed through the law ministry and attorney general of Pakistan. Why, then, have we been paying the said firm a hefty amount of 25,000 British pounds every month for so long when the timeline has not been met and there’s no knowing if anything at all will come from all these cases? Far more importantly, why do our governments get into deals to catch criminals who have stolen national wealth, throw in yet more taxpayer money for the job, and then draw a complete blank every time? And why on earth do they bypass required procedures when they do such things? Now who will tell the people just how long the government will keep paying the British law firm to go after Altaf Hussain?

Does anybody need to be reminded how much damage such half-baked accountability drives have done to national reserves? The Broadsheet example alone shows that, even after spending millions of dollars, the government was unable to recover any stolen money and instead made the people pay $28 million in fines. Not just the Sharif family but also all those implicated in the arbitration judgement between Broadsheet LLC and government of Pakistan/National Accountability Bureau (NAB) continue to evade justice and roam free while the people are left licking their wounds, which have been inflicted by their own representatives. The country had to suffer similar embarrassment, and the people were forced to foot yet another needless bill, when a three-member Pakistani Supreme Court bench headed by former Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhary termed the Reko Diq mining deal void by a stroke of a pen in 2011. That, in 2019, finally led to an international arbitration tribunal of the World Bank’s Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) to award damages worth $5.84 billion to Tethyan Copper Company Limited (TCC), whose contract had been violated. The fact that Pakistan had just worked out a bailout program with the IMF for about the same amount ($6 billion) shows how much such blunders have cost this country and its people. The government must, of course, pursue all individuals and parties that deceived, plundered and stole from this country. But it should make its decisions very wisely and engage law firms that can wrap up such cases in the stipulated time and also enable the government to bring the looted wealth back home. *