Comment by Riaz Haq on December 24, 2016 at 10:34pm

Here are a couple of excerpts from "Playing with Fire" by Pamela Constable:

"Sugar is critical commodity in a country (Pakistan) where people consume vast amounts of sweet tea, soft drinks, and cakes, using about 4 million metric tons of sugar a year. .....Sugar is also very profitable. Pakistan is among the top five producers of sugar cane in the world, employing more than two million seasonable laborers at harvest time, and sugar refining is the second largest agribusiness after flour milling. According to National Accountability Bureau, a majority of country'd eighty-plus sugar mills are owned by political families, including Sharifs and Bhuttos, as well as members of parliament and several military-controlled enterprises."

"In Pakistan, the sugar industry is actually a political industry in which powerful politicians on all sides are involved", said a 2009 statement from the Sugar Mills Workers Federation that described how the big millers cheat mall growers through fake middlemen, then manipulate sugar prices by pressuring the government to stimulate or discourage exports depending on how much cane has been harvested."

"Throughout the 1990s, during two periods of rule by Sharifs and two by his archrial Benazir Bhutto, the privatization process became a game of grab and run. Investing of investing in solid projects, many business groups colluded with corrupt officials to make quick profits. They borrowed huge sums (from state-owned banks) without collateral, created and dissolved ghost factories, purchased state assets at token prices, avoided paying taxes, defaulted on shaky loans, or deferred paying them indefinitely....Major defaulters and beneficiaries of loan write-offs, granted by both the Bhuttos and Sharif governments, included some of Pakistan's wealthiest business families-- Manshas, Saigols, Hashwanis, Habibs, Bhuttos and Sharifs......using the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), the (Musharraf) regime (after year 2000) went to prosecute eighteen hundred cases of corruption to recover nearly $3.4 billion in assets."

https://books.google.com/books?id=Y-wU1aVyM9IC&pg=PA40&lpg=...

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 14, 2020 at 1:45pm

By the time he was ousted from power, Zulfikar had become so convinced of his own greatness and indispensability that he did not believe the generals would dare hang him. As I shall describe, there is good reason to believe that he only came to realise that he would actually be hanged a few hours before it happened. As for Benazir, her continued engagement in politics was not just a case of giving up the comforts of Dubai and New York so that she could fight for her ideals. Her political comeback in 2007 also enabled her to get all the legal cases against her overturned. The amnesty she secured from General Musharraf scuppered a Swiss trial in which there was a very high chance she would have been convicted of, among other things, using money from bribes to buy a necklace worth $175,000.

Bennett-Jones, Owen. The Bhutto Dynasty (pp. 14-15). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.



Ghulam Murtaza’s experience entrenched the Bhuttos’ view that there was always a way around legal cases. It is a view that has recurred across the generations. By working within the legal system to secure acquittals, the Bhuttos were taking advantage of what many colonial administrators saw as a weakness in their judicial arrangements. If a British official such as Mayhew made accusations against someone such as Ghulam Murtaza and the court found him innocent, then Mayhew’s authority was undermined. From the point of view of the Bhuttos, however, the system meant they could behave in their locality much as they always had and then work on securing exoneration in the courts. Some landowners tried to reject the British system altogether. The Bhuttos played a subtler game of securing their objectives by working within it. For over a century now, many Bhuttos, from Ghulam Murtaza through to Bilawal, seem to have believed that making legal accusations against them is a political tool wielded by opponents.

Bennett-Jones, Owen. The Bhutto Dynasty (p. 31). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

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