Scam Land

FEBRUARY 2000 - Scams should come as no surprise to any one any more. We all understand that the country is built on scams and runs on scams. It is also very obvious that most of the country’s inmates wake up every morning and reflect quickly on how they can go out and shaft somebody to make their day truly worthwhile. This has become our national calling and the practitioners are led by the ruling classes who have perfected the art of making quick money at the expense of others. The masses, who also practice this hallowed craft, do it in a cruder manner. Some say, the scams started with the evacuee properties and we have never looked back since.

Obviously, to perpetuate a scam, you must have victims and of this unfortunate variety, there are many species. That list is too long and too miserable to repeat here but among the many who have been taken for a ride, are a body of professional film makers, actors, producers and directors, who have been wiped out in a plot that they would have been proud to have written themselves. Only, they didn’t. Someone else did and as so often happens in the predictable end of all scams, the thieves got away with the booty, the victims were left to curse their luck and the authorities who were fast asleep while all the robbing was going on, woke up briefly and promptly went back to sleep again.

It seems that almost twenty eight companies which were involved in the production of plays and programmes that were sold to National Television Marketing, now no longer in existence, having been replaced by a mutant called PTV 3, have been left high and dry, their creative effort having been bought and not having been paid for. Mr. Kunwar Aftab, one of the country’s premier TV personalities and a man who has spent his life making films and working with TV and Cinema, leads the group of professionals who are running from one end of the country to the other, seeking justice and hoping to recover their money. Chances of either of course are remote, this being a country where there is neither justice nor recovery.

The private producers have grouped themselves into Karachi and Lahore Zones and according to their records are owed Rs. 4.05 m and Rs 3.05 m respectively by NTM, which as you might have read in the earlier part of the script, is happily no longer around, its Chief Executive ‘living with relatives’ in the relative safety of UK. Apparently the business went something like this. NTM would commission programmes from private producers or whoever was brave enough to venture into this business. These were then produced by the parties themselves without any financial input from the channel. At the time of buying these programmes, NTM would make an agreement on their letterheads, not any legal paper (very clever). Invariably, the amounts agreed to were never paid in full, in the case of the lucky ones who got that far. The entire business was built on a cycle of 90 days credit since the channel claimed that it took that much time for them to obtain payments from advertising agencies through whom this work was routed to advertisers who were sponsoring the programmes. NTM itself was running into financial wrangles and owing large sums of money to STN from whom it leased time to run its programmes and as is now discovered, the income tax and excise departments of the government. How these august departments allowed the dues to run into millions is of course beyond the comprehension of lesser mortals like us, who know too well that the first failure to pay, results in dire consequences. But then we must never forget that there are different laws for different people.

As the pie hit the fan or whatever it is that hits fans in such cases, NTM was baptized and given a new identity. TV 3. The private producers who were left in the middle did the only thing they could. They took to the streets and pressed for their dues. A meeting was finally convened by the Managing Director of PTV at Islamabad and a number of decisions were taken which would eventually resolve the issue of unpaid liabilities of NTM. According to this, NTM would surrender all its archival record of productions to PTV which would auction these and with the proceeds, settle the debts. PTV also agreed to collect all outstanding payments owed to NTM by advertising agencies, a fairly easy task for the channel since agencies cannot survive without PTV. Minutes of this important meeting were to be prepared and circulated. So far so good.

As is predictable in such cases, nothing happened. There are no recoveries, there are no payments and there aren’t even any minutes, not that these would serve any purpose. The archival record of NTM, apparently the only asset it had, seems to have disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle and there is no trace of it. PTV has nothing to say and neither has its officials any words of comfort or hope for the private producers, who largely comprise the same family of actors, professionals and broadcasters. The private producers have neither the infrastructure nor the means to take the fight to the courts (where justice is as hard to find as ice cream in the Sahara) and so linger on, their life savings gone and their creditors breathing down their necks. Another scam has claimed its share of victims and there are some names in that list. My friend Rahat Kazmi is there, owed Rs. 4,680,800. Rubina Asharf, Rs. 1,693,804 and another 26 more make up that sad list. I remember an old woman trudging up the steps of Services Cooperative many years ago moaning that she had lost all her life savings in a branch of this cooperative in Sahiwal. The sum of money was Rs. 1500, a fortune for her. Of course she never got a penny. It wasn’t in the script.

The news of the latest financial scam from England where his excellency the High Commissioner has some embarrassing explaining to do will not send a cheer through the ranks of the private producers. Mr. Akbar S. Ahmed has to explain how he paid 70,000 pounds to his two sons for work they did not do (what did they do?) and why is Mr. Jamil Dehalvi demanding his fees which were not paid ? Tut, tut, tut. And to think that these people are supposedly going to show us the life of Mr. Jinnah ! What irony. But then neither is Mr. Ahmed going to pay any dues, nor will he suffer any tribulations. In fact, if I am not wrong, he will emerge from this and rise further. In another world, as Pakistan’s High Commissioner, the very association of his name and that of his office with a financial impropriety should have led to his immediate offer to resign, but that would be in another world. Here, in the case of the private producers, the Managing Director of PTV has a chance of a lifetime to redress a wrong and publicly announce concrete steps to end this sorry business. Whether he will, is another story.