The UK’s Mail on Sunday – Daily Mail – has apologized to Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, and his son-in-law Imran Ali Yousaf, in a massive defamation case against the London based newspaper. The case involved a story published by Daily Mail in 2019 which alleged that Shehbaz and his relatives had been involved in siphoning off money from what was then called DfID; according to the story, the money donated by DfID to help the victims of the 2005 earthquake in Kashmir had been siphoned off by Shehbaz and his son-in-law. These events are reported to have taken place in 2006 and reporter David Rose claimed the story to have been irrefutable. Shehbaz Sharif challenged the story in court and after three long years, during which Daily Mail delayed filing a reply, it has finally conceded that the story could not be proved and has tendered an apology and removed the story from its website.
This is a big victory for Shehbaz Sharif in the allegations of corruption being brought against him repeatedly by the PTI. But the PTI is not to be cowed down by something as trivial as lack of proof or a court win. The party continues its campaign and has been insisting now that, per David Rose’s tweet, the article does not apologize for writing about the ‘alleged money-laundering’. It is said the story was based on allegations that came from the Assets Recovery Unit headed by former accountability chief Shahzad Akbar, who is still insisting that the allegations are correct, but has not answered reporters’ queries as to why he is holding on to this.
The whole affair ends up proving what has been written about countless times: the accountability process under Shahzad Akbar was essentially used as a means to vilify and humiliate political opponents as well as to bring in cases against them which could lead them to jail. The prolonged hearing of the case in various stages in courts in the UK and Daily Mail’s apology place a huge question mark on the issue of why the PTI’s allegations have time and time again proved to be incorrect. Shahzad Akbar and his unit clearly have a lot of answering to do as do other members of the PTI who even now hold on to the allegations and continue to retweet and repeat them over and over again despite the lack of proof. It is also disturbing that the PTI is even willing to damage the credibility of Pakistan as a state and ruin relations with international aid agencies. We need to detoxify the political environment if we wish to survive the economic shocks, climate change, and a deeply divided polity.