Pakistan is reverberating with shock after an official investigation held ranking members of Karachi’s most popular political party, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), responsible for a September 2012 arson attack on a garment factory that killed 259 workers. It was alleged that the attack was carried out after the factory’s owners refused to meet demands for a Dh7.35 million extortion payment.
Submitted to the Sindh High Court on Friday, the findings of the investigation conducted jointly by police, paramilitary and military intelligence officials are based on a June 2013 confession by a detained MQM activist. He alleged, in some detail, that the proprietors were threatened by the party’s top officials in the Baldia Town area of Karachi, where the garment factory was located. The businessmen supposedly took their complaint to officials at MQM party headquarters, only for one set of extortionists to be replaced by another.
When they persisted with their refusal to pay, the factory premises were purportedly sprayed with flammable chemicals by party activists, who set it on fire just as workers were gathering to collect their pay. The workers could not escape because the factory’s exits had been blocked.
The factory proprietors were blamed for the fire and charged with manslaughter. According to the informant, the owners were then blackmailed into making a somewhat reduced extortion payment by an MQM official, who had supposedly abused his authority as a Sindh provincial government official to have their bail cancelled.
The investigation report makes for gruesome reading, and it would be easy to conclude that the MQM was responsible for a ruthless act no less barbaric than the Taliban’s massacre of 148 people, mostly children, at a Peshawar school in January.
In the interest of objective assessment, it is pertinent to ask: Does the MQM have a track record of extortion and murder? The answer would seem to be “yes”.
Indeed, the investigation report was not so much the big story in Pakistan’s social media community as was the fact that Dawn, the country’s leading English-language newspaper and a Karachi institution, had shown great moral courage by naming the MQM and its officials.
However, the disclosures in the High Court did not take place in isolation.
When the news broke, the MQM was on the verge of rejoining the Sindh provincial government, after a protracted disagreement with former president Asif Ali Zardari, chief of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). The PPP could well have backed out because it didn’t want to be seen to be providing immunity from prosecution to the MQM. Instead, the deal went ahead, because of the inherently cynical nature of Pakistan’s power politics.
Nonetheless, events since Friday suggest that a decision has been taken in Islamabad to permanently defang the MQM.
On Sunday, the military-led paramilitary force deployed in Karachi since 2013 announced it had obtained a confession from a senior MQM official that he had ordered the killings of political party activists and lawyers in May 2007. The killings were carried out to prevent a rally of support for a Supreme Court chief justice who had rebelled against the junta of General Pervez Musharraf.
Here, there is considerable room for scepticism. Journalists, including myself, who had the unfortunate duty of covering the events of May 12, 2007, are in no doubt that the military was complicit in disarming the police and handing over the streets of Karachi to roaming packs of armed MQM activists. About 60 people died that day in the most blatantly public demonstration of political cold-bloodedness any living Pakistani could recall.
That is just one instance in a complicated history between the military and the MQM. Another dictator, General Zia Ul Haq, nurtured the creation of the party as a counterweight to the PPP’s political domination of Sindh province. However, the military soon came to regret creating a monster, and in 1992 launched a brutal crackdown. When, in 2002, Musharraf set about building a civilian facade for his junta, he quickly concluded that he needed the MQM block of seats in parliament if his allies were for form a government in 2002. So, the party re-emerged from the ashes.
The culpability extends to Mr Zardari, who has played good cop-bad cop with the MQM to keep it on his side since the restoration of democracy in 2008. The MQM’s armed militant wing has since been matched, bullet-for-bullet, by Karachi gangsters publicly patronised by the PPP’s provincial ministers, as a means of containing the MQM and gradually weakening its grip on Karachi.
According to underworld sources, those gangsters had issued a concurrent extortion demand to the owners of the ill-fated garment factory – a commonplace occurrence that frequently sparks deadly exchanges of gunfire between rival extortionists.
Such sinister “politics of corpses”, as Pakistani commentators have come to call it, provide the backdrop for the meeting of political party chiefs and top military officials scheduled for Friday, jointly ordered on Monday by prime minister Nawaz Sharif and the army chief of staff, General Raheel Sharif.
Tom Hussain is an independent journalist and political analyst based in Islamabad
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Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
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More than 2.2 million Indian tourists arrived in UAE in 2023
More than 3.5 million Indians reside in UAE
Indian tourists can make purchases in UAE using rupee accounts in India through QR-code-based UPI real-time payment systems
Indian residents in UAE can use their non-resident NRO and NRE accounts held in Indian banks linked to a UAE mobile number for UPI transactions
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