The Pakistani establishment’s shenanigans are so many and yet they find ways to keep them under wraps. It is only occasionally that they come to surface and people hear about them.
One such incident happened today when Mr Muhammad Akram Shaikh, Supreme Court lawyer for both former army chief Pervez Musharraf and Mansoor Ijaz of the Memogate fame, decided to speak openly about what he was asked to do by the establishment.
Angrily stating that “his bank accounts had been frozen and he was unable to run his law office” Shaikh points out that “he had also received a notice from the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) for Rs11.2 million as advance tax for the tax year 2018.”
According to Shaikh ever since he took up “the treason case and filed a petition in the Supreme Court which led to the disqualification of PTI’s former secretary general Jahangir Khan Tareen, his corporate and individual clients were being chased and his practice as a lawyer had nosedived.”
In this video, Mr Shaikh asserts that he agreed to the case in which the Sharif government took Musharraf to court on charges of treason because he thought that the security establishment was on board. However, he soon found out that was not true.
Another interesting revelation in the video (13:46-15:20) is when Mr Shaikh says that in the infamous Memogate case he agreed to become the lawyer for Mansur Ejaz (who has been missing from public view from 2012) after the establishment negotiated this and promised him $500,000 which Ejaz (who has a troubled reputation) subsequently did not pay him and the generals who were the guarantors did nothing either.
As Pakistanis, the question we need to ask is how and why do Pakistan’s intelligence services and operatives involve themselves in legal matters whether it is Memogate or a former army chief – Musharraf’s – trial. And not satisfied with these antics, the establishment’s latest instrument of choice Chief Justice Saqib Nisar has taken these to a new level.
