Pakistan Today

Calibri 2007: The font that prompted the undoing

Abdullah Niazi

The report of the Joint Investigation Team submitted to the Supreme Court yesterday quite explicitly stated in its conclusions that Maryam Nawaz Sharif has submitted falsified documents and manipulated facts.

One can assume that the JIT has reached these damning deductions after exploring many avenues and looking at all possible angles of the case at hand. However, one of the incriminating pieces of evidence suggesting the forgery of documents did not involve detailed sleuthing or intricate forensic evidence but rather revolved around the use of the Calibri font in one of the ‘Trust declaration’ documents presented to the JIT by Maryam Nawaz Sharif.

 

 

Yes, that’s right. The devil is, indeed, very much in the detail. The discovery was made in a routine inspection by a UK based Forensic Handwriting and Document Examiner.

The ‘Trust declaration’ documents given to the JIT by Maryam Nawaz to prove that she was a trustee rather than a beneficiary were typed in the Calibri font. The documents are dated 2006. The Calibri font was launched for use in Microsoft Office Word on February 1 2007. The natural assumption that the JIT made was that “neither of the originals of the certified Declarations is correctly dated and happy [sic] to have been created at some later point in time.

The typo in the statement which was clearly meant to be ‘happen’ instead of ‘happy’ makes sure however that the helpless smugness the JIT must have felt at discovering the understandable yet implicating error. Even the creators of the font could not have thought back when they invented the font that it would be a quirky yet pivotal point of a monumental legal report with a wide-ranging impact on millions of people, an entire country and even an entire region.

While their other headaches mean they have generally been quiet up until now, the PML-N and their supporters will eventually respond to what is quite uncreatively being labelled ‘Calibrigate.’ This response will entail an excessive provision of a litany of excuses to defend every single point the JIT has pointed out including this seemingly hilarious mess up which may have very non-hilarious repercussions.

As many have pointed out on social media, where the entire debacle first rose to prominence, perhaps Maryam Nawaz will argue that the Calibri font was invented in Ittefaq Foundries in the 1970s by her late grandfather. Or perhaps Mian Shehbaz may argue the font had been created in the Arfa Kareem tower by the PML-N’s prodigal daughter Maryam. Another said, quite seriously, that maybe it had been sent to the Sharif family for beta testing before it was officially launched in 2007.

 

 

However, the one fact that may somehow have been used by the PML-N to some justification is that the Calibri font was invented in 2004 rather than 2007. February 1 is only the official date it became available to the public. This too went up in flames, however, when someone quite conveniently messaged the Microsoft help desk which confirmed there was indeed no way that any company, person or organisation could have had access to the font before that date in 2007. This only proves that the JIT’s conclusions were perfectly legitimate.

 

 

At the end of it, all that has happened does not seem more than a comedy of errors. An amalgamation of slapstick salutes, mistaken identities, and seemingly minor details causing major issues does make one snort. It just cannot be helped. It is all so ridiculous yet all so very grave an issue. One can only hope that the resulting decisions will not warrant the same kind of response.

 

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