ISLAMABAD: The Dis­trict and Sessions Judge of Islamabad convicted Shoaib Sheikh, the Axact group’s chief executive officer, as well as 24 others in the fake degrees scam case on Thursday and awarded them 20 years imprisonment.

The court, however, acquitted three co-accused — retired colonels Younis and Jamil, and the wife of Shoaib Sheikh — for want of evidence.

Chaudhry Mumtaz Hussain, the judge, also imposed a fine of Rs1.3 million on the convicts.

Mr Sheikh and his associates were booked on June 7, 2015, under sections 419, 420, 468, 471, 473, 109/34 of the Pakistan Penal Code and section 4 of the Anti-money Laundering Act of 2010. Since the convicts have been awarded jail terms ranging from three to seven years, they will undergo a maximum of seven years in prison.

The Federal Investigation Agency had registered an inquiry on May 19, 2015, against M/s Axact Ltd Islamabad region on a charge of preparing and selling degrees of fake online educational institutions with fake accreditation bodies, enticing innocent people through impersonation as student counsellors within Pakistan and abroad.

Raids were conducted on Axact’s offices in Karachi and Islamabad. According to the petitioner, during an interview the group’s regional head, retired colonel Jameel Ahmad, retired Lt Col M. Younis and other officials were unable to provide any plausible explanation of their online fast-track prior learning assessment (PLA) education operation.

Statements of some of the employees clearly showed that their sales agents would impersonate as highly qualified student counsellors from non-existent institutions, pretending that they were working in the USA by using that country’s UAN numbers. Their self-assurance would put all doubts and suspicions of the caller at rest and then staggering amounts of money would flow into offshore accounts operated by Axact.

Case closed

Pervaizul Qadir Memon, a former additional district and sessions judge, had acquitted Shoaib Sheikh and 27 of his associates in the fake degrees case on Oct 31, 2016. Mr Memon was, however, removed from service after he admitted to receiving a bribe in return for the acquittal.

Earlier on April 4 this year, the Islamabad High Court had set aside the acquittal of Shoaib Sheikh and remanded the case back to the sessions court for a fresh trial.

The 16-page judgement, authored by an IHC division bench comprising Justice Athar Minallah and Justice Miangul Hassan, declared that “the impugned judgement is vitiated on the sole ground of the pecuniary interest of the presiding judge against whom the charge of accepting illegal gratification stands established”.

The court, however, told the accused who were on bail to furnish fresh surety bonds to the trial court.

Syed Ashfaq Naqvi, the FIA’s special prosecutor, argued that the software company sold fictitious degrees to people in Pakistan and abroad, brin­ging bad name to the country.

Claim to fame

Axact was founded by Shoaib Ahmed Shaikh in 1997 as an IT company.

It is based in Karachi and has over 2,000 employees.

According to the company’s website, it had 10 different business units as of 2015 and more than two billion users. It claimed a global presence across six continents, 120 countries and 1,300 cities.

But the seeds of its fame and trial lie elsewhere. The saga unfolded with the publication of an investigative story by The New York Times in May 2015 alleging that the company ran 370 degree and accreditation mill websites.

The report claimed that although Axact deals in software, its main business was “to take the centuries-old scam of selling fake academic degrees and turn it into an internet-era scheme on a global scale”.

Axact denied all the allegations.

Following the publication of the article, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, who was interior minister at the time, ordered the Federal Investigation Agency to begin an inquiry to determine whether the firm was involved in any unlawful activity.

A cybercrime team of the FIA raided Axact’s offices in Karachi and Islamabad soon after, seizing computers and taking into custody 25 employees in Karachi and 28 from its Islamabad office.

The FIA team said it had seized several blank degrees as well as a fake letterhead of the US State Department.

A report released in April 2016 claimed the scandal was “bigger than initially imagined”.

The report said Axact took money from over 200,000 people in more than 190 countries and that Shoaib Shaikh owned a number of shell companies in the US and the Caribbean.

Most of Axact’s revenues from its fake diploma sales came from the United Arab Emirates, where hundreds of residents were reported to have used its diplomas to secure lucrative jobs.

Published in Dawn, July 06th, 2018