ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Imran Khan Sunday welcomed the release of Pandora Papers leak saying that it exposed the ill-gotten wealth of elites, accumulated through tax evasion and corruption and laundered out to financial “havens”, ARY NEWS reported.
In a series of messages on Twitter, the prime minister said that his over two decades of struggle has been premised on the belief that countries are not poor but corruption causes poverty because money is diverted from being invested in our people.
Also, he said that this resource-theft causes devaluation, leading to thousands of poverty-related deaths.
“Just like the East India Company plundered the wealth of India, ruling elites of developing world are doing the same. Unfortunately, the rich states are neither interested in preventing this large-scale plunder nor in repatriating this looted money.”
Imran Khan further shared that the United Nation’s SG’s Panel FACTI calculated a staggering US$7 trillion in stolen assets parked in largely offshore tax-havens.
“My government will investigate all our citizens mentioned in the Pandora Papers and if any wrongdoing is established we will take appropriate action,” he said.
Read More: MORE THAN 700 PAKISTANIS NAMED IN PANDORA PAPERS LEAK
The prime minister also called on the international community to treat this grave injustice as similar to the climate change crisis.
“If unchecked, inequalities between rich and poor states will increase as poverty rises in the latter,” he said adding that this, in turn, will lead to a flood of economic migration from the poor to the rich states, causing further economic and social instability across the globe.
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