Illegal assets

The good chief justice may order away to his heart’s content but somehow Zardari's government wiggles its way out.

His Lordship the chief justice of Pakistan may order, which he does with frequency, but, sadly and realistically, he cannot enforce an order. That is left to the government, or the executive, or whatever be the competent authority. This present government, supposedly of the people, if we remember correctly, was extremely reluctant to reinstate Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry as the country’s chief justice and did as much as was, at the time, possible to stop him from returning to what was considered to be his rightful seat.

Since then, this government of undesirables has cocked many a snook at a selection of orders handed down which did not suit its despicable or expedient plans, particularly when the presidential immunity comes into play. Our head of state, Asif Ali Zardari, thanks to his father-in-law’s constitution, may well now be covered when it comes to charges of alleged corruption. But all good things (and, thankfully, bad) come to an end and one day, in the natural order of things, he has to lose the conferred immunity and emerge out into cold reality.

The Swiss money laundering case, for example, is not dead. On October 1, 2010, the Swiss parliament passed a significant law which will allow countries such as Pakistan to perhaps recover billions of dollars shunted into Swiss banks. It is designed for cases involving assets frozen in Switzerland which were unable to be returned to the abused country under traditional international law, especially where immunity is claimed by the head of a state.

The law in question is the Return of Illicit Assets Act. (Details can be found at thestatesmen.net/news/swiss-return-of-illicit-assets-act-pakistan-can-get-billions-back).

On April 1, 2010, the Los Angeles Times briefly reported: “A Pakistani government agency asked Swiss authorities to revive money laundering charges against President Asif Ali Zardari, the latest in a series of setbacks that have weakened the Pakistani leader’s standing in the nuclear-armed state. The move came a day after Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry threatened to jail the top official of the country’s anticorruption agency if he did not reopen cases against Zardari and other bureaucrats and businesspeople within 24 hours.”

Well we all know what followed. To repeat, the good chief justice may order away to his heart’s content but somehow and anyway the government, which rests in the hands of Zardari, wiggles, or attempts to wiggle, its way out. (A case in point, right now, is the most disgusting National Insurance Company Limited scam involving the cream of the soured cream which forms our government and so-called elite.)

According to the website quoted above, the Swiss government now, under the Act, needs only to show that funds held in Switzerland by an alleged corrupt official are significantly larger than he or she could credibly have earned in office — and that the country concerned is known, even renowned as in our case, for its corruption. It estimates that the money lying in Swiss banks channelled there by numerous Pakistanis amounts to $200 billion. The parallel economy is said to be growing at the rate of 20 per cent per annum, with every fifth rupee transacted in this land of the pure being black.

So, we must patiently wait for the day to dawn (if it ever does) when a relatively less corrupt government appears on the scene, all the old tiresome tried and failed politicos who have made their hay depart, and the relevant departments such as the National Accountability Bureau, the Federal Investigation Agency, the Federal Board of Revenue, the Anti-Narcotics Force and so forth do what they are supposed to do — seek guidance under the Avoidance of Double Taxation and Exchange of Tax Information from the Swiss government and play catch up with the crooks.







Published in The Express Tribune, July 9^th, 2011.