Government legal team to hold meeting on Pandora Papers: Fawad Chaudhry

The government’s legal team will hold a chief meeting to review the names cited in the Pandora Papers leaks, said Information Fawad Chaudhry on Monday.

PM Imran Khan promises to investigate ‘all citizens’ named in Pandora Papers.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Imran Khan pledged to investigate “all citizens” revealed in the Pandora Papers leaks.

“If any wrongdoing is established we will take appropriate action,” the prime minister stated.

The PM welcomed the findings, “exposing the ill-gotten wealth of elites, accumulated through tax evasion and corruption and laundered out to financial ‘havens’.”

He stated that the UN SG’s Panel FACTI has calculated a staggering $7 trillion in stolen assets parked in largely offshore tax-havens.

The prime minister went on to state that his “over-two decades’ struggle” was based on the belief that it is not countries that are poor, but corruption that 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,” he had said.

Mentioned the example of the East India Company, he stated “plundered the wealth of India”, and that now “ruling elites of 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,” PM Imran Khan stated.

Vowing to inspect and taking action against all those named in the inquiry, he called on the international community to treat this “grave injustice” with the same urgency as the climate change crisis.

“If unchecked, inequalities between rich and 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 and social instability across the globe,” he highlighted.