When Babar took the floor, Akbar had already stolen the show.
Pakistan surfaced as an independent country on August 14, 1947, primarily due to a prolonged political struggle. Hardly a person from the state institutions, colonial masters had introduced to perpetuate their rule on our part of the world, ever participated in the struggle, covertly or overtly.
Yet, a few months after our independence, some well-entrenched elements from the same institutions ganged up to control and regulate the political scene of the new country. They could not grab complete control without projecting politicians as 'corrupt' without exceptions. And this facilitated and justified frequent interventions by non-elected institutions of the state in the name of 'eradicating corruption.' The story, starting in the 1950s, keeps repeating itself with many updated versions to this day.
General Pervez Musharraf also vowed to establish good governance after taking over in October 1999.Fighting corruption was put on top of his 7-point agenda. And to furnish the appearances of a 'crusade' for this fight, he established the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) and empowered it with draconian powers. He had to leave power in 2008, but the country is yet not considered 'clean' and the NAB continues to wage a relentless war on corruption, with a new found energy since the advent of Imran government in August 2018.
But the cause of fighting corruption by NAB started to look like a cruel joke, after a media savvy chief executive of a company, claiming to be the ultimate hunter when it comes to finding 'hidden money of the corrupt politicians,' began to spin juicy stories for sensation-hungry anchors of popular media and a peculiar group of YouTube influencers. He decided to speak out, only after extracting a huge amount of 28 million US dollars from Pakistan late last year.
He received the said amount by invoking 'arbitration powers' of a British court. He proved his case for 'compensation' while relying on an agreement that was negotiated with accountability boys of the Musharraf government, way back in 2000. After enjoying services of an offshore registered company, Broadsheet, NAB had unilaterally cancelled the agreement in 2003. The company consequentially suffered liquidation.
That created a wonderful opportunity for Kaveh Moussavi, a law-savvy entrepreneur of Iranian origin. He bought over the liquated company and with fanatical vigor chased Pakistan to get 'compensation' for the cancelled agreement.
After acquiring a handsomely huge...
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