It was apparent right from the beginning, that Nawaz Sharif was not going to take the whole Panama Papers episode lying down. While his daughter’s ‘A-team’ fought it out in the media during his trial, It was party oldie Haneef Abbasi who pursued the Imran Khan and Jehangir Tareen disqualification case in the Supreme Court.
To begin with the revelation of Imran Khan’s offshore company, the pretentiously named ‘Niazi Services Limited’, was not as much of a smoking gun as Nawaz Sharif and his children’s names appearing in the Panama Papers. Nonetheless, it did provide an indirect defense to the ruling party with “he also has an offshore company” and allowed the media to enjoy an encore of sorts to Panamagate.
Ideally, the PML-N would have wanted Imran Khan to meet the same fate as Nawaz, but as an insurance against the likelihood of that not happening, Jehangir Khan Tareen, Khan’s front man, was also made respondent in the petition.
Khan had already sold his London apartment and was basically on trial for having his name related to an offshore company while not being a shareholder or director in the said company. The court required a money trail for his Banigala property, and Khan, with the undeniably crucial help of his ex-wife Jemima, was able to provide that and satisfy the court.
Tareen’s case on the face of it seemed weaker than Khan’s at the outset. Three of the four charges against Tareen; his SECP incident that had been settled by paying a fine, misrepresentation and short payment of agriculture income tax and loan write offs were never going to stick. But not declaring a 12-acre London estate worth between 5 and 7 million pounds did not look good, no matter what the technicalities around its ownership.
With Nawaz being ousted for not declaring an asset he was legally supposed to in his nomination papers, Tareen’s defense of the money to buy the property being legally earned, tax paid and sent abroad through banking channels and that his children controlled the trust under which the asset was held counted for more or less nothing.
Soon after the decision in the case was reserved, chatter of a ‘balancing act’ by the judiciary in which Khan would be safe and Tareen would have to go started making rounds. That is exactly what happened, and Tareen is now disqualified for life from holding public office. Both the Nawaz Sharif Panama Papers case, and Imran Khan/Jehangir Tareen disqualification case highlight two important problems.
One, that regulatory/accountability institutions are incompetent and inefficient to keep parliamentarians in check making it necessary for the apex court to intervene, and two, that Zia-ul-Haq’s self-serving insertion of Articles 62 and 63 into the constitution – to blackball anyone who opposed him – are arbitrary, undefined and too open ended.
Of the three parliamentarians who faced the unpredictable axe of articles 62 and 63, it was ironically the most outspoken person against the laws – deeming them unimplementable in one interview – who survived: Imran Khan.
