Shoaib Shaikh

Degree degree hoti hai…

They had played their cards right. In fact, it scared other media barons just exactly how right they were playing their cards. You see, whereas other upcoming news channels used to advertise themselves in the usual we-will-be-uncompromising-beacons-of-the-truth manner (yawn), Bol TV was advertising itself to journalists, not the audiences. And it was playing all the right notes.

Constantly facing delays in the disbursement of their already diminutive salaries, the working journalists were shown an organisation that didn’t set its standards as low as merely paying salaries on time. Not only would they be paying their (much higher than market) salaries on time, but they would also be introducing the sort of Silicon Valley perks that even many in the local corporate sector don’t offer. Pools, gyms, chauffeurs, plush offices, the works. And a series of grand, swanky galas.

A gold rush ensued. Of not just pundits and newscasters but also technical staff. For the public, the biggest name to join might have been Kamran Khan, but for the journalist community, it was Azhar Abbas, the man who had previously run Geo and Dawn News, whose joining had made it clear that Bol meant business.

Questions started being asked. Who is funding the channel? The answer: a little-known IT company called Axact. What does it do? No one knew.

Videos of Axact’s boss, Shoaib Shaikh, started doing the rounds, where his hyperbolic speeches about the Axact and Bol mission statements were, well, a bit silly. He seemed like a clever-enough, confident, scrappy little fellow, who might have made it in some local industry but didn’t seem suave enough to have created as large an international software company as he claimed Axact was, that too in the ERP field that he said they were in. Could they even name a client of their ERP software?

It was Declan Walsh’s story in the New York Times that finally did answer this question. Axact, it turned out, was a diploma mill. Degrees for cash. In some cases, even setting up faux online classes for the more clueless of their prey. For business development, they employed some rather predatory tactics, including the impersonation of HR officials of the companies their prospective clients were working in. Get this degree or we’ll kick you out.

A maelstrom followed the NYT story. There was a feeding frenzy amongst the rest of the media houses, with blanket coverage to the now disgraced enterprise. Shoaib Sheikh even made a couple of defensive appearances on TV himself, but the lack of a coherent, plausible answer to the but-what-does-Axact-do question made him fall flat on his face.

All of the heavy-hitters who had joined, then left, for reasons of “integrity”. So big was this retreating battalion that the very few who stayed put, like Mushtaq Minhas, seemed to, in a quaint manner, have more integrity.

At the centre of this all, of course, was Shoaib Sheikh, whom the FIA arrested soon afterwards for fraud and money laundering.

A bright middle-class kid, he had attended the prestigious IBA where he is said to have gone into the term-paper writing racket while he was still a student. He then started his software company in 1997.

Though he built it up creatively, he was understandably shy about sharing his empire’s details and made his employees sign non-disclosure agreements. He was desperate for a veneer of respectability. Funnelling that wealth into another legitimate business would have been well and good but nothing could spell having arrived as much as being a media mogul would have. But this meant making enemies who buy ink by the tonne. It meant flying too close to the sun.

So, soon it became evident that the unending gravy train that was going to pay for all those salaries and gyms and grand galas wasn’t a respectable software house after all.

A Gatsby story. You know how it is, old sport.