Imran Must Call Zardari’s Bluff
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada

There are a few constants in Pakistan’s chequered history that show no, or little, sign of going away.
One is that, to date, the mysteries surrounding the murders of two Prime Ministers of Pakistan, Liaquat and Benazir, are nowhere close to being solved. The layman’s conventional wisdom may long have known who killed these two popular leaders of Pakistan, but the cover of official secrecy and silence, no matter how morbid, refuses to give an inch of space.
Another constant is that Asif Ali Zardari, a swindler and master of corruption, has not, to date, been found guilty of umpteen number of cases of wholesale corruption and money-laundering against him. Lo and behold, the corruption-king not only regularly struts around as one of the ‘big’ political leaders of the country but still has the second largest province of Pakistan, Sindh, virtually in permanent mortgage to him.
Not only that, but he, despite his reputation of an unscrupulous wheeler-dealer, has the unique distinction of having presided over Pakistan as its head of state for a full term of five years. To its abiding shame, Pakistan privileged him with an honour-guard when he vacated the office of the President of Pakistan at the completion of his term. The highest office of state had never been sullied like this before and, hopefully, never will be.
However, all that may be about to change. It will change if Imran Khan, the architect of ‘Naya Pakistan,’ doesn’t waver in his avowed crusade to rid Pakistan of its endemic culture of corruption and, if, the apex court doesn’t run out of steam to not spare the ‘big fish’ of the festering cesspool of corruption from full and open accountability.
Zardari—a con-man who could teach Italy’s notorious mafiosos a full semester course in how to hoodwink a nation of 200 million-plus people over a span of more than a quarter century—is in serious trouble in the wake of the JIT report about his wheeling and dealings. And that is not a hyperbole or exaggerated statement.
For public consumption the master con-artist may put a bold face and laugh off the JIT findings against him. But the remarkable work of probing and enquiry by the JIT members culled from the ace agencies and institutions of state—FBR, the State Bank, ISI, FIA, SAEC, NAB et al.—nail down his web of deceit and cheating to the last twist of the string.
The report, submitted to the apex court last week, provides a fascinating—though also intriguing, at the same time—insight into the mega-empire of corruption concocted by the devil’s mind that Zardari seems to possess.
The JIT findings could, for convenience sake, be summed up in one sentence: ‘how to launder money in more ways than imaginable.’
Bogus, fake, bank accounts opened in the name of people—some dead but some unsuspecting living-beings who couldn’t have a clue as to how their names were used—to the tune of tens of millions of rupees.
These ersatz bank accounts—opened in banks presided over by cronies and front men of Zardari—were spun around like the Russian roulette dozens of times to minimise the chance of their origin or source ever being detected. Hats off to JIT members that they literally burned the mid-night oil to still trace them out and reveal to the utter astonishment of the people of Pakistan that millions of rupees were deposited in the name of rickshaw drivers and ice-cream vendors.
Zardari and cronies—front-men who had obviously pawned their souls to him for a share of the loot—were up to their eye-balls into this dubious game even when the master-swindler was sitting in the Presidency. He wouldn’t divest himself of his favourite sport of plunder even for a day as President of Pakistan.
But once he’d walked out of the Presidency with flying colours, his plunder became an orgy of corruption; a veritable mayhem of the resources of Sindh, which virtually became his personal fief and a turf for him and his gang of thieves to poach on to their hearts’ content.
The Sindh govt. lorded over by Zardari’s chosen minions, became fully complicit in the mega game of plundering the province’s resources to enrich the master-swindler. More than a third of Sindh’s ‘development budget’, of 200 billion rupees, ended up in Zardari’s coffers by way of loans to his dummy companies and subsidies to province-owned ‘sick’ industrial units earlier sold to these companies for pennies.
The Omni Group supposedly owned and operated by Zardari’s principal factotum and frontman, Anver Majid and sons, had only 7 or 8 companies under its shadowy umbrella in 2008. By the time JIT dug into its labyrinth of intrigues, it had mushroomed into 83 companies. Some of these existed only on paper to exact billions of rupees in loans and subsidies from Sindh banks and government.
Choicest parcels of land in Karachi—most earmarked for schools, parks and other social activities—were allotted to Zardari& cronies by complicit Sindh authorities at throwaway prices. Partaking of the loot was Malik Riaz, often charitably eulogised as Pakistan’s Robin Hood, who then sold them at a premium under his BahriaTown developments.
Not surprisingly, Zardari has reacted to the unearthing of his crimes with a shrug, pooh-poohing the JIT findings as a jumble of lies. Typical to the feudal ethics of Pakistani political culture he and his cohorts and minions have denounced the corruption charges against him as a vendetta of Imran and PTI.
For the record, the JIT wasn’t established by Imran. It was founded under an order of the Supreme Court of Pakistan. No wonder that the JIT report has been submitted to the apex court and not to the government which hadn’t commissioned it.
But a hardened criminal that he no doubt is, Zardari is trying to fight the legal battle against him on the political turf where he thinks the chips may fall in his favour.
But Zardari, who has been used to getting away with murder, literally, may have erred this time in thinking that his track record would still favour him and he would dodge the bullet once again.
Imran is not the one to duck in the face of a challenge. His fighting spirits come out in their finest elements under pressure. Zardari may have unwittingly handed him an opportunity to finish off the game that has favoured Zardari’s luck over a quarter century.
Imran’s work is cut out.Zardari’s jugular is within Imran’s reach. Zardari’s trail of loot has foot-prints of Sindh’s corrupt government machinery all over. Murad Ali Shah, the incumbent Chief Minister of Sindh, has been like a personal servant of Zardari for years—earlier as Finance Minister and lately as CM. Imran must get rid of this favourite of Zardari’s. If Murad refuses to resign—as is the case at the moment—then Imran has the option of disbanding the corrupt and moth-infested Sindh official mafia by resorting to the Governor’s rule sanctioned by the Constitution. He must not waver or procrastinate, notwithstanding the media barking dogs unleashed by Zardari and Nawaz against him.
The apex court ought to help the federal government in its campaign to rid Sindh of a corrupt cabal that has drained its fortunes for so long. It may be a unique case of the resources of a major province of the Federation of Pakistan made hostage to the whims and insatiable greed of one man.
The apex court has, finally, the wherewithal of sending Pakistan’s most notoriously corrupt, and elusive, politician to his ultimate denouement. But the reprimand administered by the CJP to the government over its initiative to put the names of Zardari and the burgeoning ranks of his thieves—all 172 of them—on the ECL is, to say the least, dismaying, if not intriguing.
On a number of occasions in the past the same apex court openly chided the government of the day for being lax in its duty and allowing alleged criminals to flee the country by not putting their names on ECL. So where did Imran’s team err by ensuring that all those named in the JIT report as suspects in the devious scheme of money-laundering and corruption on a mega scale wouldn’t flee the coop?
It’s as much a mission of the apex court, especially of its soon-to-retire CJ, Justice SaqibNisar, as of Imran to go after masters of corruption in Pakistan with crusading zeal. The mountain of corruption piled up by the likes of Nawaz and Zardari will take a joint effort of the govt. and the top judiciary to move and dismantle. Let the decks be swept clean of these eye-soars of corruption on CJP Nisar’s watch. He, along with Imran, will have carved their names in gold in Pakistan’s history as deliverers from the corrupt political mafias of Pakistan.
- K_K_ghori@hotmail.com
(The writer is a former ambassador and career diplomat)