WHEREVER the money goes, controversy follows. The PMLN-led federal government, which recently announced that it will be using ‘190m pounds’, originally repatriated by the UK’s National Crime Agency under a settlement agreement with property tycoon Malik Riaz, to build a university in Islamabad, is being criticised for not using that money to support existing public sector universities that have been suffering an acute funding crisis. The sum, which totals some 35bn in Pakistani rupees, could have helped bridge the Rs60bn shortfall faced by the Higher Education Commission this year, informed stakeholders say. However, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif intends to use that money to set up the Daanish University of Emerging Sciences, which appears to be an extension of the Daanish Schools project he initiated as chief minister of Punjab, and which is closely associated with his name. The irony of funds tied to PTI leader Imran Khan’s Al Qadir University now being used for a different ‘political’ university project cannot be missed. It is undoubtedly hypocritical that what this government had spent months arguing were ‘public funds’ are now being used to build its own political capital.

It is worth recalling that this money, a little more than half of the total deposited in the Supreme Court’s accounts on behalf of Bahria Town for its BTK housing project, had been allocated to the federal government by the apex court in November 2023. The remaining Rs30bn was handed over to the Sindh government despite severe apprehensions about the provincial government and its departments’ central role in facilitating Bahria Town and abetting its unlawful activities, as established in the original judgement in the BTK case. Meanwhile, six years after its settlement with the Supreme Court, Bahria Town remains in default of the agreement. There is no clarity about how much it still owes the Supreme Court and whether it can or will pay the dues. The apex court and the government, too, have not been very clear about how the BTK judgement is to be enforced. The settlement was to expire in August 2026, by which time the developer was supposed to have paid Rs460bn in instalments, along with 4pc mark-up on all late payments. It had paid only a small fraction as of late 2023, having unilaterally suspended further payments after the £190m were credited, claiming it was being penalised ‘unfairly’.

Published in Dawn, March 18th, 2025