A senior military officer who primarily served during the tenure of former dictator General Pervez Musharraf amassed a host of properties abroad and hid them from the government for years until global money laundering investigations into the role of offshore companies exposed them.
A report by investigative news organisation Fact Focus investigated the assets accumulated by Lieutenant General Shafaat Shah.
The report found that he had bought properties in at least three countries, including the UAE, the United Kingdom and the United States of America, apart from accumulating properties in Pakistan.
The report claims that Lt Gen Shah procured a flat in London while serving as the Corps Commander in Lahore, which looks at the border with India.
However, he bought the flat from an Indian businessman for less than half the price the businessman had paid to acquire it a few months prior.
While records of the Federal Board of Revenue for Gen Shah to start filing his taxes commence from 2002, his wife started to file taxes in 2007, and their only son, Razaullah Shah, started filing taxes in 2014.
But none declared ownership of offshore properties until 2017, months after the infamous Panama Papers were published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).
The flat in London was bought in 2007 by Indian businessman Akbar Asif, the son of legendary Indian filmmaker K. Asif, through an offshore company, Talah Limited. It was registered in the name of Gen Shah's wife, Fariha Shah. Her 2017 declaration showed she owned 50% of the property worth £155,000 (equivalent to $310,000 in 2007). Three years later, Raza was listed as an equal owner of the flat after he was listed as a director in the same offshore company. Raza said he paid another £155,000 for his 50% share. This put the total value of the apartment at £310,000.
The same year, Gen Shah paid Rs73,785 in taxes in Pakistan.
In response to queries from Fact Focus, Gen Shah said money to buy the flat came from selling a plot in DHA Lahore and the full sum was paid to an intermediary in Pakistan. He further said that the flat was purchased to facilitate his son's education in the UK.
His son, Raza, was just 14 years old when the flat was purchased. His son later pursued education in the US and did not study in the UK, Fact Focus found.
Moreover, his wife claimed that the money to buy the flat was a gift from her father, Brigadier (retired) Liaqat Asrar Bokhari.
Asif and Gen Shah had crossed paths when the former presented to former dictator General Pervez Musharraf a copy of the Indian film Mughal-e-Azam created by his filmmaker father. Gen Shah, who was pictured alongside Gen Musharraf at the time, said that his only role in the meeting was that he was there and witnessed it, while it had been arranged by Pakistan's former envoy to the United Kingdom Maliha Lodhi and Gen Musharraf's wife.
Lodhi, however, denied having arranged the meeting.
After retiring in 2009, Gen Shah acquired two additional offshore properties, one in the UAE and one in the US.
The property in the UAE was bought in 2011 but disclosed in 2017. Gen Shah told Fact Focus that the UAE property's source of funds was the salary he received for working with UAE-based information technology Texpo. The flat was worth an entire year's salary that Gen Shah was entitled to.
In 2012, he bought a condo worth $1.4 million in downtown Manhattan from a Korean man.