A dash of hypocrisy

Imran Khan owns up to avoiding British taxes as he is entitled to do and has done nothing illegal in Pakistan

For those unfamiliar with medieval siege warfare, a man was ‘hoist with his own petard’ — or put simply, was foiled by his own plans to harm others — when he got hurled at a castle wall by the same throwing-device that his bomb (the ‘petard’) was attached to, with generally messy consequences. A similar outcome is not expected in the matter of the revelation that Imran Khan has owned an offshore company in his past but the metaphor is apt nonetheless. The confirmation came from Mr Khan presumably as a preemptive move as the information regarding his offshore activities in the UK in 1984 was in the public domain anyway and about to be made hay with by any number of media outlets. It transpires that Mr Khan did nothing illegal, he merely acted on the advice of his then accountant in order to mitigate the burden of tax that the British government was imposing — 35 percent at the time. This was, and remains, standard practice for people wealthy enough to attract hefty taxation and is mostly within the law.

The property in London was sold in 2003 and the proceeds brought to Pakistan where they were utilised for the construction of Mr Khan’s current residence in Bani Gala. All legal and above board. Where the petard, hoisting thereof, comes into play is in the matter of Papers Panamanian and the strident pursuit by Mr Khan of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif whose name does not appear in said papers but who has family members that do. The petard currently aloft is engraved with a statement from Mr Khan to the effect that the only reason that people open offshore companies is to hide ill-gotten wealth or to evade taxes or both. So Mr Khan owns up to avoiding British taxes as he is entitled to do and has done nothing illegal in Pakistan. Neither, seemingly, has the prime minister so far. Does anybody detect the faintest whiff of hypocrisy in Mr Khan’s revelation? We merely pose the question in the public interest.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 15^th, 2016.

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