PM Imran Khan responds to Pandora Papers: My govt will investigate all our citizens mentioned

PM Imran Khan responding to Pandora Papers has released a statement in a series of tweets on Sunday evening.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists or ICIJ has released 11.9 million leaked documents to expose the “financial secrecy” of world leaders, including 700 Pakistanis.

Finance Minister Shaukat Tareen, PTI Senator Faisal Vawda, Ishaq Dar’s son, Minister for Industries and Production Khusro Bakhtiar, PTI leader Abdul Aleem Khan are among the 700 names the Pandora Papers leaks.

 

PM Imran Khan following the release of the Pandora Papers in a statement welcoming the report said that his government will investigate the Pakistanis mentioned in the leaks.

The statement reads: We welcome the Pandora Papers exposing the ill-gotten wealth of elites, accumulated through tax evasion & corruption & laundered out to financial “havens”. The UN SG’s Panel FACTI calculated a staggering $7 trillion in stolen assets parked in largely offshore tax-havens.

My over-two decades’ struggle has been premised on the belief that countries are not poor but corruption causes poverty because money is diverted from being invested in our people. Also, this resource theft causes devaluation, leading to thousands of poverty-related deaths.

Just like the East India Company plundered the wealth of India, ruling elites of the developing world are doing the same. Unfortunately, the rich states are neither interested in preventing this large-scale plunder nor in repatriating this looted money.

My govt will investigate all our citizens mentioned in the Pandora Papers & if any wrongdoing is established we will take appropriate action. I call on the international community to treat this grave injustice as similar to the climate change crisis.

If unchecked, inequalities between rich & poor states will increase as poverty rises in the latter. This in turn will lead to a flood of economic migration from the poor to the rich states, causing further economic & social instability across the globe.