IHC seeks trial court record that led to the acquittal of Axact CEO

ISLAMABAD: The Islamabad High Court (IHC) on Wednesday sought the complete records of the trial that led to the acquittal of Axact Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Shoaib Shaikh and others in a case pertaining to alleged fraud, extortion and money laundering.

Justice Athar Minallah asked authorities to produce the record after the Federal Investigation Agency’s (FIA) counsel informed that the agency’s request seeking certified copies of the record had still not received a response.

The state, through the FIA Islamabad Cybercrime Circle deputy director, has challenged the October 31, 2016, decision by which Additional District and Sessions Judge Pervaizul Qadir Memon acquitted the Axact CEO and 25 others.
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The agency, in the petition, maintained that the enquiry was ordered against Axact for selling degrees through a network of fake online universities where staffers posing as student councillors pushed their customers, within Pakistan and abroad, to pay extra money for fraudulent legalisation or attestation through governmental institutions and officials.

A raid was conducted at Axact’s Islamabad office on May 19, 2015. During on-the-spot interviews, the petition said, Axact’s regional head and other officials failed to provide a reasonable explanation in the wake of the allegations against the company.

Some of the statements revealed that Axact’s sales agents were pretending to be qualified student councillors from “fraudulent, non-existent, fictitious academic institutes, pretending to be based in the United States (US),” for which they used American universal access numbers (UANs).

The student councillors convinced people to deposit huge sums in Axact’s offshore accounts in lieu of fake online degrees, certificates, diplomas and accreditations from varying government bodies, it added.

According to the FIA, the impugned judgment was based on “misreading and non-reading” of the available evidence, and more so, that the evidence produced by the prosecution was misinterpreted and not appreciated by the trial court in its true perspective.

The oral evidence, which was natural in its flow, was totally and wrongly disbelieved by the trial court in the absence of any hint of malice or ill-will on part of the prosecution witnesses, the petition continued.

The documentary evidence gathered and produced by the FIA was adequate to conclude that the suspects were directly involved in the offence but the trial court committed an illegality while acquitting the 26 suspects, said the petition.

The agency insisted that the benefit of doubt extended to the accused persons was on assumptive basis instead of hypothetical analysis and that the “impugned judgment is based on surmises and conjecture.”

The petitioner urged that the impugned judgment of October 31, 2016, may be declared illegal and set aside. In addition, it is requested that the accused persons may be convicted and punished in accordance with the law.

The infamous Axact case surfaced in May 2015 when a New York Times (NYT) article said that the company had run a global network of fake online universities that manipulated customers and generated tens of millions of dollars in estimated revenue annually by selling bogus degrees. Axact had denied the allegations, calling them “baseless”.

In the trial court, Shoaib Shaikh’s counsel had maintained that the FIA could not produce substantial evidence against the suspects. While the prosecution argued that the FIA had recovered fake degrees from Axact offices and that the company sold those degrees to clients worldwide and brought a bad name to Pakistan.

Source: Dawn