Axact owner will not leave Pakistan to escape FBI, Interpol: Sethi

LAHORE: Senior analyst Najam Sethi on Saturday said there had been a feeling from day one that there was something fishy about Axact, which proved true.
When they announced to launch BOL TV channel while hiring top anchors with unprecedented salaries, the question had arisen how they would manage that given the market wasn’t expanding, he added. “This is how our attention was attracted to it.”
Expressing his views in Geo News programme ‘Aapas ki Baat’, Sethi said he and (Muneeb) were also offered a job but they did not respond positively, while thinking that how the BOL owners assembled such huge assets.
According to Sethi, the questions were asked about Axact as soon as they announced to launch BOL which involves billion of rupees. There has been no information about the Axact’s products given that it claims to be a leading IT company. The journalists opted to join the network but the media house owners were puzzled how Axact managed to attract so many big names and what is its source of money. And given that the advertisement market is small, the new TV channel will share the biggest slice amid the aggressive marketing by Axact. And that’s how the probe began.
Declan Walsh is a good investigative journalist and he had always been curious about BOL during his stay in Pakistan. He must have worked for at least six months on the story with the New York Times (NYT) providing all the resources.
The story was checked by the NYT’s legal experts for confirming each and every fact before being published. Proving the fraud case of this magnitude isn’t easy for the Pakistan government which does not have the necessary resources. The reason is that the Axact is not a Pakistan-based company with the setup in Dubai while the front companies are spread in different parts of the world, including Latvia and Estonia.
However, the pursuing the income tax case is easier given that Axact says it is an IT company and service provider. The IT is a well-defined term and there is no tax on its products (software) in the country. The FBR will ask them that their products do not fall in the IT category, helping in questioning their proceeds amounting to billions of rupees.
The FBR will pursue the case on the premises that the business of Axact is not running the business of software export which would lead of registration of cases.On the other hand, many people in the US and the UK will raise the fraud issue, claiming that bogus degrees have been handed over to them, thus suing the Axact in courts. The Axact has already been fined once each in the US and the UK but the amount has not been paid yet.
The FBR and the NYT have assessed that Axact has only 15% to 20% share in the income generated in the US from the bogus degrees as there are many other players as well. It will result in new legislations there. The FBI will also come into action to check whether the money is used to sponsor terrorism or it is a case of money laundering. And that is why all the Axact-related companies are vanishing as if they never existed.
The Axact owner, Shoaib Sheikh, will not try to leave the country because of the fear of FBI and the Interpol. He can obtain bail and stay from the Pakistani courts but he cannot escape the FBI and other US authorities.
About the journalists who joined BOL, Sethi said they were unhappy with their previous organisations or had been attracted by attractive salary packages, while thinking that all the owners acted in the same fashion. Another factor was that the journalists changing media houses wasn’t a new thing, he added.
About the resignations of senior journalists from BOL, he said they might have earlier been unrealistic or a little bit greedy earlier. They had understood that all the bank accounts of Axact would be frozen and who would finance the project after that, he said, adding that the issue of conscious was also there.