Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: International bookmakers predict there are 10 percent chances that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif will step down in the aftermath of Panama leaks.

An interesting debate has started among the bookmakers and gamblers about whose scalp would the Panama Papers scandal claim next. Irish bookmaker Paddy Power Bet has opened betting lines on which head of state could be the next to go. Paddy Power has laid 10-to-1 odds that Nawaz Sharif will leave office. “Who needs the Grand National when you’ve got the Panama Papers to punt on?” the betting line boasted in a press release. Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson had already announced stepping down after Panama Papers revelations that he and his wife sought to hide their claims on Icelandic banks that were bailed out by his administration during the financial crisis.

Paddy Power puts the odds of British Prime Minister David Cameron resigning next at 20-1. The leaked documents revealed that Cameron’s father Ian Cameron as a client of the Panamanian law firm, Mossack Fonseca, at the center of the scandal. Cameron’s father used a secret but legal offshore structure to set up a fund for investors. A surer bet according to the bookmaker is Argentina’s President Mauricio Macri at 8-1 odds. Macri won last year’s general election campaigning on a platform promising to fight corruption but the leaked documents say he was a director of Fleg Trading Ltd, founded in 1998 by his father Franco Macri, one of the richest men in Argentina.

The company was dissolved in January 2009. “It was an offshore company to invest in Brazil, an investment that ultimately wasn’t completed, and where I was director,” he said in a television interview with a local programme. According to a Paddy Power spokesman there had already been a few bets made that Macri and Cameron were next to leave their respective offices. Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko is almost as good at 12-1. Poroshenko – nicknamed the ‘chocolate king’ – hid his ongoing interest in his candy company, Roshen, in a blind trust offshore when he became president in 2014. He had promised to sell it after being elected. Longshots to leave include President Xi Jinping of China, Russia’s Putin and France’s Francois Hollande, all set at 33-1.