Ali Jahangir Siddiqui, a Pakistani investment banker, wouldn’t have liked the reason for which he made the news in April 2013 – a fistfight over a bonus.
The Cornell University graduate, who had carefully cultivated his image as a philanthropist by working for Pakistan’s perennial flood victims a few years earlier, was a director at Jahangir Siddiqui and Company Limited (JSCL) – an investment firm controlled by his father.
JSCL wanted to reward Ali, who was also a shareholder, with a bonus of around $4 million for a deal he had helped secure. Other stockholders weren’t too happy about the hefty payout to just one shareholder – apparently the biggest of its kind in the country’s history.
On the day bonus was supposed to be finalised, men barged into the annual meeting of JSCL shareholders in a Karachi hotel. A fistfight broke out and people threw chairs at each other.
“I’d never seen anything like this,” a journalist who witnessed the commotion told Turkish TV. “The worst that could be expected at such gatherings is to see shareholders elbowing each other for free snacks.”
Ali, now in his late thirties, is in the news again. This time he made the headlines, over a tussle in Islamabad between the government and a military establishment unhappy with Ali’s recent change of careers.
Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, from the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz party, nominated Ali as Pakistan’s ambassador to the US in early March.
Ali, who also runs a local bank, has close commercial ties with Abbasi. They own stakes in the private airline Air Blue and Ali serves as special assistant to the prime minister.
His appointment as an ambassador to the most important capital in the world has annoyed career diplomats of the Pakistan Foreign Service who feel sidelined. It is also opposed by the opposition leaders.
But it’s the military establishment that is particularly unhappy to see “a boy” take over as Pakistan’s next man in Washington, which has taken a harsh stance against Islamabad in recent months, symptomatic of the fraught relationship the two countries struggle with.
An unnecessary mess
“This a political appointment, which means Ali would have to step down when the term of the government ends in few months,” Salman Bashir, Pakistan’s former foreign secretary, tells the Turkish state-owned TV.
Pakistanis will elect a new government after the incumbent administration completes its tenure in June. Under the rules, political appointees in official service such as Ali will have to step down the day the government leaves the building.
Just days after Ali’s appointment, Pakistan’s top anti-corruption authority opened an investigation into him. It dug up old corruption allegations, including the 2013 bonus. Though a government organisation, the National Accountability Bureau works independently.
NAB’s move has discredited Ali’s reputation which makes it difficult for the government to press ahead with its decision, Naeem Khalid Lodhi, a retired lieutenant general of the Pakistan Army, says.
“Washington would be wary of hosting an ambassador who faces corruption allegations.”
Since Ali’s nomination, more allegations have surfaced linking his businesses with the government’s.
Just days before he was appointed the prime minister’s adviser in 2017, billions of rupees from government pension funds were moved to prop up the deposit base of Ali’s JS Bank.
COURTESY: TRT WORLD
