Nawaz Sharif had a habit of losing power. Other men lose
their keys or their reading glasses. Sharif lost governments.
The first big one went in 1999. General Pervez Musharraf and
his army friends came for him in a coup, the kind of thing that happens in a
country with a long memory for tanks. Sharif was locked up for a while. Then he
was let go, in the way powerful men are sometimes let go: put on a plane to
Saudi Arabia and told, in effect, don’t come back.
But he did come back. It took more than a decade, but he
did, and in 2013 he became prime minister of Pakistan for the third time. You
would think a man who had been through that would have learned to watch his
back.
Four years later, it happened again. This time there were no
tanks and no generals on television. It was done by five men in robes, and it
began with something so small you could have missed it.
A paperwork problem.
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Let’s back up. In 2016, a huge cache of documents leaked out
of a Panamanian law firm. The world called them the Panama Papers, and they
were full of secrets that rich people had paid good money to keep. Among the
names was the Sharif family. The papers tied them to offshore companies and to
some very expensive real estate in London, including four apartments at
Avenfield House, on Park Lane. That is not a street for people who worry about
the rent.
The matter ended up in Pakistan’s Supreme Court. And here is
the strange part, the part that makes you lean in a little: Sharif was not
brought down by the offshore companies or the London flats. Those were the
smoke. The fire turned out to be somewhere else entirely, in a company in the
United Arab Emirates called Capital FZE, where Sharif was listed as chairman.
On April 20, 2017, the five judges hearing the case could
not agree. Two of them, Asif Saeed Khosa and Gulzar Ahmed, said Sharif should
be disqualified right then and there. The other three weren’t ready to go that
far. They wanted a Joint Investigation Team, a JIT, to dig into the family’s
money and see what came up.
The team was led by a man named Wajid Zia. It was given
sixty days. Sixty days is not long to go through a family’s secrets, but they
went in with their shovels.
What they brought up was this. Records from the Jebel Ali
Free Zone Authority showed that Sharif had held the chairman’s post at Capital
FZE from August 7, 2006, to April 20, 2014. The job came with a salary
entitlement of 10,000 UAE dirhams a month.
Sharif did not deny it. He had held the position. But his
lawyers said it was ceremonial, a title on paper that had something to do with
his residency permit in the Emirates. And the salary? They said he never
received it. Not a dirham.
Here is the thing, and it’s a funny one. Wajid Zia, the man
who led the investigation, later admitted that his team had found no bank
records showing money from Capital FZE going into Sharif’s accounts. No
receipts, either. Nothing proving he had ever been paid.
An ordinary person might have thought that was the end of
it. No money, no crime.
The Court saw it differently.
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The justices decided that the salary Sharif never collected
was still something he had. It was money owed to him, a right to be
paid, and the law calls that a receivable. A right to payment has value. If
something has value, it is an asset. And an asset, the Court said, belongs on
the paperwork a candidate files when he runs for parliament.
Sharif had not listed it in his nomination papers for the
2013 election.
On July 28, 2017, the Court handed down its ruling. The
words were these:
“…therefore Respondent No. 1, Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif, is
held not to be honest within the meaning of Section 99(f) of the ROPA and
Article 62(1)(f) of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, 1973;
consequently, he is declared disqualified from being a member of the
Majlis-e-Shoora (Parliament).”
Read that twice if you like. The question was no longer
whether Sharif had gotten the money. It was whether he should have written down
that someone owed it to him. A candidate in Pakistan must submit a statement of
assets and liabilities along with his nomination, and that statement is part of
the machinery of running at all. The Court tied the missing line to the honesty
requirement in Article 62(1)(f). Not honest, they said. And just like that, he
was out of the National Assembly.
And then came the part that sounds like a trapdoor.
Pakistan has a parliamentary system. The prime minister must
come from among the members of the National Assembly. Take away the seat and
you take away the chair. When Sharif lost his seat, he lost the prime
ministership in the same stroke, automatically, the way a house falls when you
pull out the foundation.
It was not impeachment. It was not a no-confidence vote,
which is the other road out of the office. Nobody in the Assembly had turned on
him. The Court had not asked whether he still had the votes. It had asked only
whether he was eligible, and when the answer came back no, everything
else came down with it.
One more detail, because it matters. On the day of the
ruling, Sharif had not been convicted of any corruption crime. The Court
ordered the National Accountability Bureau to file references against the
family with an Accountability Court, but that was a separate road. What took
him down that day was the asset declaration and Article 62(1)(f). Nothing more.
It was a small thing, and it was enough.
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Naturally, people argued about it.
The Court had used its original jurisdiction under Article
184(3), a power that lets it hear matters of public importance involving
fundamental rights without waiting for the lower courts to go first. In a 2018
article in the International Journal of Constitutional Law, Moeen H.
Cheema pointed to the Panama case as an example of the Court’s growing reach
into the country’s politics. Here was a tool that let judges not only decide a
question of law about one member of parliament, but remove a prime minister on
the spot. Some people saw justice in that. Others saw a court that had wandered
a long way from its own backyard.
Sharif and his lawyers fought on. They filed a review
petition, challenging among other things the legal basis for the
disqualification and the way the Court had handled those un-withdrawn
receivables. On November 7, 2017, the Court dismissed it. The disqualification
stood.
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But the story had one more turn in it, and it had to do with
a question that sounds almost philosophical. How long?
Article 62(1)(f) says a member of parliament must be honest
and trustworthy. It does not say how long you stay dishonest once a court has
called you so. In 2018, in Sami Ullah Baloch v. Abdul Karim Nausherwani,
the Supreme Court read the article to allow disqualification of indefinite
duration. In plain words, forever. A man could be barred from parliament for
life over a line on a form.
Then, in January 2024, the Court changed its mind. By a 6–1
majority, it held that Article 62(1)(f) does not itself set the length of a
disqualification, nor does it lay out the procedure for declaring one. The
Court recognized the Elections Act 2017, as amended by parliament, which caps a
disqualification under that article at five years.
Five years. And by the time of the 2024 general election,
more than five years had passed since July 2017.
The door that had been shut was open again.
Sharif walked through it. He stood for office, won a seat in
the National Assembly, and took back the leadership of the Pakistan Muslim
League-Nawaz. But he did not go back to the prime minister’s chair. That
belongs now to his younger brother, Shehbaz Sharif.
Nawaz is still around, though. People still ask what he
thinks, and he still tells them. Which, if you consider where this story
started, is something close to a miracle, and a reminder of how long the memory
of a country can be.
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