Some bitter truths

The accountability bar is rightly set higher for those elected to represent the people, transparency an expectation

With all the 256 pages of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) report into the Panama Papers affair now in the public domain, there is widespread astonishment and considerable dismay at least in the PML-N camp at its contents. Nobody can accuse the JIT of slacking on the job or a lack of thoroughness. The report is dense but lucid and pointed in its findings. None of the respondents were found to be entirely truthful in their responses to the 13 questions that formed the basis of the inquiry. Some responses were exposed as outright lies and nobody could have expected that something as simple as a typographic font may prove to be the thin end of the wedge that could topple a political dynasty. (NB this is already being challenged via an alteration to the Wikipedia ‘Calibri’ font entry.) It is now for the Supreme Court to decide on 17^th July what it wants to do with the report, and whether there is sufficient evidence therein to disqualify Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif from office and refer him and other respondents to the National Accountability Bureau (NAB).

However Fontgate pans out the PML-N is sufficiently rattled to have convened a meeting at the PM House in Islamabad as it struggles to come to grips with the fallout from what is undeniably a damning report. The meeting is going to have to map out a strategy that is legally sustainable for the Sharif family, and merely dismissing the JIT report as ‘rubbish’ is not actually a strategy in law. What is at issue is not that the PM or any of his family members have played fast and loose with public money but that there is a ganglion of unexplained occurrences in their private finances that occurred when the PM at various times held public office that suggest, and strongly, that he is a man whose financial dealings are at best questionable and unbecoming of a man in public office. The accountability bar is rightly set higher for those elected to represent the people, and transparency an expectation. A source within the PML-N said that for the first time ‘the option for in-house change is up for discussion.’ A potentially seismic event indeed.

As the mandarins of the PML-N meet in solemn conclave the circling sharks suddenly smell blood in the water. At last there are wounds that leak sufficient ichor to suggest that there is a feast to be had, and that if the shiver of sharks pool their collective resources then maybe, just maybe, the PM can be unseated. Opposition parties are due to meet imminently with a single agenda item — the going of Nawaz Sharif. All is going to hinge on whether the two dissenting members of the Supreme Court bench that held the original hearings into the Panama Papers affair are persuaded to change their position, and if they are and a consensus is reached on the bench then the PM really may be in trouble.

The JIT did not spend its time creating a work of fiction. It was diligent and painstaking and burned the midnight oil. What is revealed is an embedded culture of financial dishonesty and disingenuity that reaches far and wide across the Sharif family in its extended format. Further it is clear that there are government offices and departments that are prepared, whether coerced or otherwise, to collude at deception and prevarication, to create smokescreens and blind alleys the better to obfuscate the seekers of bitter and uncomfortable truths. The Sharifs will now do everything in their considerable power to discredit the JIT report; and the opposition parties do everything in their powers to deepen the wounds. There is going to be blood.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 12^th, 2017.

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