WHEN Nawaz Sharif recently announced that he would return to Pakistan, not everyone believed him. On July 6th the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), an anti-graft court, had sentenced the 68-year-old former prime minister to ten years’ imprisonment. In such circumstances, Pakistani politicians usually head to London, rather than leave it. Moreover, Mr Sharif’s wife is on a ventilator in a London hospital. Yet as The Economist went to press, Mr Sharif continued to insist that he would board a flight back to Lahore, his home town, on July 13th. His advent could alter the course of national and state elections on July 25th.
That the NAB, pronounced “nab”, convicted Mr Sharif had come as little surprise. In part, it was because he did not satisfactorily explain how his family came to own four luxury apartments on Park Lane, a posh street in London. The ownership of the flats was made public by the leak in 2016 of the Panama Papers, a trove of...Continue reading
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