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.