Questions and answers

Two of the many questions being asked with reference to Panama Papers have already been answered

Two of the many questions being asked with reference to Panama Papers (PP) have already been answered. One, Prime Minister (PM) Nawaz Sharif‘s name does not appear in the Papers and; two, his sons, Hasan and Hussain have already admitted that they own the London flats. What is needed to be cleared, among many other matters on a priority basis, is whether or not Maryam Safdar, Prime Minister’s daughter is a beneficiary of one of the properties mentioned in the PP or is she simply a trusty of Hussain’s property.

Since there is no law against purchasing and owning property in a foreign country, the owners of these flats or the one who bought them have not broken any law of the land. However, it is a crime to launder money and it is also a crime to purchase property anywhere in the world including Pakistan with tax evaded money, money made out of bribes or made through illegal kickbacks and commission.

So, the PM’s children would need to prove that London flats were purchased with clean money, money legally transferred from Pakistan or money earned legally outside Pakistan. And if it was legally transferred money with which those flats were purchased then who in the family had been declaring them in his/her tax returns all these years? However, it would be next to impossible for any investigating agency to produce documentary proof to debunk the claim of the family, if it were to actually claim that no tainted money was used in the purchase of the property because it would be well nigh impossible to retrieve the tax returns of anyone dating back to a quarter of a century. The next question is why was this property not shown in the tax documents of the PM since his return home from his forced exile in 2007? This has an even simpler answer: by that time these flats had been inherited by his children.

One cannot rule out the possibility that it was the late Mian Sharif, the father of Sharif brothers who had actually bought the London flats in his own name in early 1990s and going by the family culture in this part of the world, these flats along with most of the properties owned by the Sharif family had remained in the name of the elder Sharif until his death which occurred during the time the family was in exile.

And even if the flats in question had been inherited by Nawaz after the distribution of the property on the death of his father, he most probably had distributed the London flats to his children before his return home in 2007. And again, since being in exile he was not filing his income tax returns for eight long years, the question why these properties were not shown in his tax returns during that period does not arise at all. And it is also possible that since by the time Mian Sharif had departed from this world, his grandchildren had come of age and were running their own businesses, one in Saudi Arabia and the other in London perhaps the grandfather had bequeathed the flats directly to his grandchildren.

Since the PM’s sons do not hold any public office in Pakistan and since what they own today they had inherited from their elders while the family was in exile in Saudi Arabia they cannot be accused of breaking any law of the land for keeping these flats in the name of an offshore company in Panama.

And since the PM either never owned these flats in his name or even if he had inherited them after his father’s death he had, most probably while still in exile, distributed them among his children he too cannot be accused of using tainted money to buy these flats either when his party ruled the Punjab or when he had enjoyed the Prime Ministerial powers twice in Islamabad in the 1990s or for not showing them in his tax returns that he had been filing since returning home in 2007.

So, perhaps all that the first family needs to do is to produce the legally authenticated document setting down the ‘will’ of the late Mian Sharif to get itself exonerated from the allegations being levelled against it.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 5^th, 2016.

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