Islamabad: Leaked tax records of Pakistanโs former Chief of Army Staff General Qamar Javed Bajwaโs family, reveal that all of them became billionaires during his tenure as the countryโs army chief.
According to a report in Asian Lite, the leaked tax records do not come as a surprise since corruption runs deep in the Pakistan Army. The recent revelations only reinforce the view of the rot within the Pakistan Army. The report says that even though Pakistanโs Senior Generals and officers have been at the receiving end of state largesse in the form of fat salaries and other perks, they still act in a corrupt fashion that does not behove a military force.
The details of the Bajwa familyโs financial dealings were revealed by the Pakistani website FastFocus. The report included the dealings of Bajwaโs wife Ayesha Amjad and daughter-in-law Mahnoor Sabir.
The report claimed that the Bajwa family members had acquired assets amounting to PKR 12.7 billion during Bajwaโs term as Pakistanโs Chief of Army Staff. The assets of his wife, Ayesha Amjad, went from zero in 2016 to PKR 2.2 billion (declared and known) in six years.
โFrom getting his sister-in-law Asma Bajwa the position of a highly paid human resource consultant for the national airline to helping his 70-year-old brother retain a cushy Pakistan International Airline (PIA) job in the UK, there is so much that Bajwa must answer for,โ according to a report in Asian Lite.
According to Asian Lite, one aspect of Pakistanโs current situation is corruption within its Army. As Lord Acton once said, โPower corrupts and corrupts absolutelyโ that is the lesson learnt from the story of General Bajwaโs family becoming wealthy overnight, the report said.
โNow that Bajwaโs blue-eyed boy, Munir is appointed as Pakistanโs army chief; it will be business as usual with no heads rolling for the rampant corruption plaguing the Pakistani army. Financial mishandling, corruption, and influence peddling by generals for personal gain have been the subject of several scandals in Pakistan,โ media reports have said.
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At the beginning of this year, data leaked from Credit Suisse, an investment banking firm registered in Switzerland, revealed information about 600 accounts linked to 1,400 Pakistani citizens. Account-holders included several key politicians and generals, including the ex-ISI chief, General Akhtar Abdur Rahman Khan.
โExpose like this coming out is nothing new. It has been well-known for a long. We also know the case of a Pakistani General who fled from Pakistan and opened a chain of pizza huts in the US. So itโs nothing new,โ says, Defence Expert Lt Col JS Sodhi (Retd).
On 27 August 2016, an article titled โLust for Landโ was published in the Pakistani newspaper โDawnโ that exposed the reality of multiplying defence societies and the Pakistani Armyโs insatiable hunger for land.
Several other reports from Pakistan have claimed that the Pakistani Army is using government land to fulfil commercial interests.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by HW News staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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