Islamabad: Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, has been forced to leave after he was disqualified from office by the Supreme Court.
A key piece of evidence in the corruption investigation against the prime minister and his children was Microsoft’s Calibri font.
The PM’s daughter, Maryam Nawaz, used Calibri to forge documents about illegal offshore companies, Nielsen and Nescoll Limited, which were flagged in the Panama Papers.
The documents submitted by Maryam Nawaz — purportedly created in 2006 — were typed in the Calibri font.
But there was only one problem.
The font wasn’t publicly available to computer users worldwide until 2007, according to the investigation team’s leaked report.
This disclosure was made by a British forensic handwriting firm.
The designer of Calibri font, Lucas de Groot, told Pakistani media that he believes that the document signed by Maryam Nawaz was “produced much later [than 2006], when Calibri was the default font in MS Word”.
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Calibri font’s first public beta version, according to Wikipedia, was released on June 6, 2006 — four months after the papers were purportedly signed by Maryam Nawaz.
As the Calibri controversy gripped Pakistanis, Wikipedia was flooded with dozens of edit requests to change the release date of the Calibri font, due to which Wikipedia had to prevent further editing.
Saqib Quyyam, a prominent Wikipedia editor in Pakistan, is the one who pushed the ban following numerous attempts to edit the page.
“As of Wikipedia’s counter-vandalism team, I had to ask an administrator to lock the page to restrict any further edits in order to avoid misleading information being spread outside of Wikipedia,” Quyyam told Gulf News.
Wikipedia editors were surprised to find the site at the centre of a major corruption scandal in Pakistan, he said.
“[The] Wikipedia community is truly surprised to learn that Wikipedia has become a part of the fontgate scandal, which could end up toppling the government. We have seen much bigger controversies surrounding the project but this one is most interesting,” Quyyam said.
