ISLAMABAD ( Web News )
Prime Minister Imran Khan Sunday welcomed the Pandora Papers exposing the ill-gotten wealth of elites, accumulated through tax evasion and corruption and laundered out to financial havens.
In series of tweets on social media platform Twitter, he said, “We welcome the Pandora Papers exposing the ill-gotten wealth of elites, accumulated through tax evasion and corruption and laundered out to financial haven.”
The United Nations SG’s Panel FACTI calculated a staggering $7 trillion in stolen assets parked in largely offshore tax havens, he added.
The PM said, “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 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,” he added.
He said, “My govt will investigate all our citizens mentioned in the Pandora Papers and 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,” he noted.
According to International Consortium of International Journalists (ICIJ) the #PandoraPapers is the biggest dataset ICIJ has ever investigated, 2.94 terabytes of confidential information from 14 offshore service providers — enterprises that set up and manage shell companies and trusts in tax havens around the globe.
The leader of Pakistan Tehreek i Insaf (PTI) and senior minister Punjab Abdul Aleem Khan tweeted after his name was also mentioned in the Pandora Papers.