A common goal
On a recent visit to Pakistan, a controversy surrounding the renaming of a roundabout in Lahore after Bhagat Singh caught my attention, not least because the freedom fighter was the…
Spotlight: ‘Drinking’ and ‘getting drunk’ – the ‘fine’ distinction!
It looked a simple enough matter, separating the bad eggs from good ones or at least those with nothing against them on record. With evidence galore available (though not in…
US Bank Secrecy Act of 1970: Currency reporting and crime of structuring
Despite provisions of currency reporting and the crime of structuring in the Bank Secrecy Act, 1970 neither the implementers nor the law enforcement agencies noted the importance of the measures.…
Global offshore money maze
All responsible governments in recent years have shown commitment to retrieving looted money by their citizens, but in Pakistan the PPP-led government during its five-year-tenure (2008-2013) acted as the main…
Stifling Jinnah’s Pakistan
We should be thankful to the returning officer who disqualified former lawmaker and one of the country’s leading columnists Mr Ayaz Amir from the 2013 elections for his alleged ‘thought-crime’…
Everything’s almost free in Spain’s parallel barter economy
It can be argued that extra-judicial interventions first by Ghulam Mohammad as Governor General in 1951 and later by military regimes and disregard of the Constitution - facilitated by either…
It’s our country
The last few months have given us the feeling that it is indeed our own country we are living in. Had this not been so, we would not have appreciated…
FATF and AML compliance requirements
1. Legal Measures: Criminalization of Offences, Investigations and Prosecutions: FATF recommendations require Criminalization of money laundering through domestic legislation.1 The recommendations also provide to specify the scope of liability in…
Nothing that a miracle can’t cure
Ask yourselves which of our problems we have solved since Independence. Do millions not continue to live in prehistoric squalor? Don’t hunger and disease still haunt the poor? Have not…
The new kingmaker
Since the return to Pakistan last month of the Tehreek-e-Minhaj-ul-Quran (TMQ) chief, Tahirul Qadri, strange things have happened in unexpected ways. A political analyst, thinking loudly, quoted William Cowper’s 1773…
