Nawaz Sharif: The Premier of Graft

Back in 1999, Tim Weiner wrote an article titled, Pakistani Report Alleges Graft by Ex-Premier, for the New York Times:

Pakistan’s deposed Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, skimmed hundreds of millions of dollars from public works, wheat imports, sugar exports and other Government projects, according to detailed records compiled by the nation’s most prominent criminal investigator.
Mr. Sharif, already under investigation by the nation’s new military Government for obtaining huge unsecured loans from state banks, enriched himself, his family and his friends in Government deals he conducted as Prime Minister, according to evidence compiled by the investigator, Rehman Malik.
”He was running the Government like his own private business,” Mr. Malik said in an interview. Mr. Malik says he has hundreds of pages of records describing Mr. Sharif’s use of state power for profit. They appear to document a decade of graft.
It began when Mr. Sharif was a rising politician in the 1980′s, grew during his first term as Prime Minister, from 1991 to 1993, when he was dismissed by Pakistan’s President on corruption charges, and continued in his second term, from 1997 until he was replaced in a military coup two weeks ago, the records show.

The record of fleecing that Sharif did included:

*At least $160 million pocketed from a contract to build a highway from Lahore, his home town, to Islamabad, the nation’s capital. The money, he says, was generated by an inflated bid accepted by Mr. Sharif. Mr. Malik says the extra $160 million took the form of a gift to Prime Minister Sharif and his associates.
*At least $140 million in unsecured loans from Pakistan’s state banks, which he says went to finance companies owned or controlled by Mr. Sharif.
*More than $60 million generated from Government rebates on sugar exported by mills controlled by Mr. Sharif and his business associates.
*At least $58 million skimmed from inflated prices paid for imported wheat from the United States and Canada.

My goodness. In fact, In the wheat deal, Mr. Sharif’s Government paid prices far above market value to a private company owned by a close associate of his in Washington, the records show. Falsely inflated invoices for the wheat generated tens of millions of dollars in cash. The list goes on:

Mr. Malik’s evidence includes several intricate examples of what Mr. Malik calls money laundering through a global network of businesses, banks and bogus transactions from Lahore to London.
In one case, he has traced the flow of $7.85 million, including borrowed Government funds, from Mr. Sharif’s family business, the Ittefaq Group. The money was transferred through money-changers in the open-air bazaars of Peshawar, Pakistan, through five accounts at the Bank of Oman, a Persian Gulf emirate, to 43 members of Mr. Sharif’s extended family.
In another case, Mr. Malik tracked $1.85 million channeled through a Swiss bank to accounts in Washington, London, Pakistan and the British Virgin Islands that he said were controlled by Mr. Sharif, his family and his friends.
And in a third case, he said, Mr. Sharif engineered Government policy for profit.
Last year, Mr. Sharif’s Government, desperately seeking foreign currency, exported 350,000 tons of sugar to India. To spur the exports, the Government offered a rebate to sugar manufacturers of about 10 cents a pound.
There was a catch: the sugar would have to be exported by rail. The Government runs the railroads. And when the trains were ready to be loaded, at least 90 percent of the rail cars were reserved for sugar produced by companies controlled by Mr. Sharif and his business associates, Mr. Malik said.