KARACHI: The Sindh High Court on Friday allowed the acquittal applications of the chief executive officer of Axact and two directors in the fake degrees case.

The SHC observed that there was no probability of the conviction of Axact CEO Shoaib Shaikh and company directors Atif Hussain and Mohammad Rizwan in the present case lodged in 2015 by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA)

The single-judge bench headed by Justice Omar Sial allowed their acquittal application and observed that after a passage of eight years, there had not been a decision and all players in the criminal justice system were responsible for this delay as liability cannot be pinned on any one person or entity.

“Citizens merely demand of the State that the State gives them speedy justice. It is incumbent upon the State to take this right of the people seriously and take measures for improvement in the entire criminal justice system,” it added.

The bench in its order further noted the state had admitted that it could not establish any falsification of accounts, forgery, cheating, dishonestly inducing delivery of property and other allegations levelled by the prosecution.

It said, “I am saddened to see that a case that had begun with the State claiming laurels and credit for its remarkable work ends with the State itself admitting that it is not in a position to justify its allegations in light of the evidence collected. It is certainly time for the State to introspect. It must be kept in mind that actions such as these if not well thought and initiated with good intentions have the massive potential of impacting Pakistan’s economy in a negative way”.

“The country’s integrity and goodwill in the international world was put at stake through such misconceived actions as it was obvious at this stage that such actions were ill-conceived and initiated almost immediately upon the publication of an article in a newspaper written by a person, who himself was declared by the state to be a persona non grata and expelled from Pakistan,” the bench remarked.

The applicants had approached the SHC after the trial court had dismissed their acquittal applications last month.

Shoaib Shaikh, his wife Ayesha, management team members and others were charged with allegedly preparing and selling fake degrees, diplomas and accreditation certificates of fictitious schools and universities through a fraudulent online system and thereby illegally minting millions of dollars.

The issue surfaced in May 2015 when The New York Times published a report which claimed that Axact sold fake diplomas and degrees online thro­ugh hundreds of fictitious schools, making “tens of millions of dollars annually”.

Published in Dawn, March 11th, 2023