Mixed verdicts

On Friday, the Supreme Court brought mixed news for the PTI as party chief Imran Khan was cleared of omitting to declare an offshore company in his nomination papers while the party’s general secretary Jehangir Tareen – who has since resigned from his party post – was disqualified from holding elected office for life for not disclosing a London property in his nomination papers and making untruthful statements in court. On the same day, the Supreme Court threw out the National Accountability Bureau’s Hudaibiya Paper Mills case, thus ending all legal proceedings against Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif in this matter. The most important aspect of the verdict in Imran Khan’s disqualification case may be that it shows just how small an effect the Panama Papers case has had on our jurisprudence. The Supreme Court verdict in that case was based not on the ownership of offshore firms but on what was essentially a technicality: that Nawaz Sharif did not declare in his nomination papers a salary he received, but never withdrew. Imran Khan was in a similar position, accused of not declaring an offshore company in his own nomination papers.

The Supreme Court ended up ruling that Imran was not an owner or director of the offshore company – even though it owned the London flat in which he lived. This decision would imply that any precedents set by the Panama case are difficult to sustain, with some commentators saying that the technicalities used to disqualify Nawaz Sharif are now not being applied in other cases. Although the PTI is claiming victory after Imran was given a clean chit – with the party explaining away Tareen’s lifetime disqualification as the Supreme Court striving for evenhandedness in its treatment of the PML-N and the PTI – the reality is less clear. Certainly, the party hasn’t been hurt as much as the PML-N was by Nawaz’s disqualification. But the Supreme Court has given the Election Commission of Pakistan the authority to look into charges that the party took funding from prohibited foreign sources.

The fact is that the real loser in all these anti-corruption cases is, ironically enough, the cause of anti-corruption itself. The politicisation of the Panama Papers case – and the subsequent judicialisation – has done nothing for the cause of anti-corruption in the country. Both former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and now former PTI general secretary Jehangir Tareen have been disqualified from office on extreme technicalities with respect to what was or was not declared in their nomination forms. The verdicts and the cases themselves have done little to nothing to tackle the systemic corruption – such as a failure to pay income tax, influence-peddling and kickbacks – practised by our political and business elite. As we have argued many times before in this space, the best way to tackle corruption is through a concerted effort by all political parties in parliament rather than relying only on the courts. The verdicts have been celebrated or bemoaned based on partisan identification but they have not led to any precedent being set on how corruption should be identified, investigated and eliminated. Both parties can claim moral victory from Friday’s verdicts; sadly the country cannot do the same.