Broadsheetgate.

ON one of his trips to Karachi towards the middle of 2000, Pakistan's 'chief executive' and army chief Gen Pervez Musharraf agreed to a meeting requested by one the country's most prominent business figures known for his services, and close ties, to the military top brass.

The meeting, in the VVIP lounge of Karachi Airport, just before Gen Musharraf was to take off on his return flight by a special aircraft to Rawalpindi, had a one-point agenda. The business figure asked for the general's help as he was being 'unfairly hounded' by NAB.

NAB, or the National Accountability Bureau, was set up soon after Musharraf's October 1999 coup with the avowed task of rooting out corruption in the country and the repatriation of 'looted' national wealth in cases where it had been taken abroad.

Lt-Gen Syed Mohammad Amjad had been named the first NAB chairman. He belonged to a rare breed of officers. Very rare in recent decades. His colleagues and juniors talk of a man committed to principles and contemptuously divorced from any material considerations.

Even as a general, when rules allow the personal use of the staff car, Lt-Gen Amjad would visit friends in his personal, rickety old Suzuki Swift without the usual fanfare. He betrayed none of the proclivities many of his colleagues and successors in the military and NAB show/would show.

The competence that has underlined NAB and its actions has cost us dearly now and even in 2008.

This was the profile of the man Gen Musharraf would need to talk to in order get NAB to lay off the seemingly servile billionaire, who was said to have had his share of skeletons in the cupboard. Musharraf told him 'not to worry', shook hands, boarded his plane and took off.

One account, which could not be verified independently, suggested Gen Musharraf contacted Lt-Gen Amjad as he was in the lounge and asked him to 'go easy' on the businessman. It isn't clear whether there was any connection between this and Amjad's exit from NAB, but a few months later he was gone.

Given what the officers who served alongside Amjad on his various postings say about him, it wouldn't be surprising if Musharraf's intervention prompted his decision. It would not fit into his scheme of things to 'go easy' on someone he considered unclean.

This was the upside. The downside was that the 'asset recovery agreement' NAB concluded with Broadsheet of the Isle of Man, reportedly without getting it vetted by the law ministry, after the chairman was satisfied...