Pakistan’s supreme court began hearings this morning that will decide the political future of Nawaz Sharif, who is clinging to his job as prime minister following publication of a damning report into corruption allegations against him and his family.
The court has the power to summarily dismiss him from office and could recommend that he face criminal investigation. Last week’s report accused Mr Sharif and his three children of lying under oath and submitting fake documents to conceal their wealth overseas.
Having vowed to parliament, investigators and the public that he had no stake in any offshore companies, the 67-year-old prime minister was revealed to be chairman of a company in Dubai. His daughter, Maryam, who has been groomed as Mr Sharif’s political heir, was accused of falsifying documents to conceal her connection to a string of luxury London flats owned by the family.
Mr Sharif has resisted calls to resign and dismissed the report’s findings as “trash”. His legal team will submit its rebuttal to the report today but questions remain unanswered about the source of the family’s massive wealth.
The scandal, which has gripped and divided Pakistan, began last year when Mr Sharif’s two sons and daughter were named in the “Panama papers”. Millions of documents leaked from the files of the law firm Mossack Fonseca lifted the lid on the covert financial dealings of the world’s superrich.
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Mr Sharif’s children were found to own companies registered in the Virgin Islands and had used them to buy four luxury flats on London’s Park Lane. His opponents accused the family of ransacking the public purse in Pakistan and using the offshore firms to launder the money overseas.
The prime minister was not named in the papers and vehemently denied any connection to the Virgin Island companies or that he had concealed any offshore assets. The revelation that he remains chairman of the firm FZE Capital, registered in a free zone in Dubai, is therefore particularly damning,
In April five supreme court judges were split over whether there was sufficient evidence of corruption to fire him. The court recommended further investigation, with a six-man panel of bankers, financial investigators and intelligence agents assembled to dig deeper into the Sharif family’s offshore wealth.
Investigators allege that there are massive discrepancies between the scale of the family’s wealth and their apparent sources of income. Stewardship of companies, including large cash gifts, are cited as a “likely attempt of money-laundering”. The report found that Maryam Sharif’s personal wealth multiplied more than 20 times in a single year during the early 1990s “without any declared income”.
Mr Sharif was forced out of office by Pakistan’s military twice in the 1990s and the family has alleged that the Panama investigation is yet another subversion of democracy by elements within the deep state.
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Local reports claim that the panel behind Monday’s findings was controlled by Pakistan’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, which had a seat on the committee. Allies of the prime minister claim that the process was biased against him from the outset, with several leading investigators known to have held posts in the government of General Pervez Musharraf after he toppled Mr Sharif in a military coup in 1999.