Currently, the Microsoft font “Calibri” has become a talking point; you might think what’s so great in it, right? Well, it is not just a font, but is also a key evidence of corruption in Pakistan.
It is a masterpiece that has helped a lot in the Panama Papers leak case. In this leak, details of customers using law firm for handling offshore accounts were revealed.
Among them were PM Nawaz Sharif’s children; the papers showed some holdings which weren’t publicly declared by the Sharif family. Investigators were of the opinion that the family had more assets, but they didn’t declare all of them. Also, they believed that the documents were faked for hiding them.
Supreme Court ordered investigation into the matter; now, when officials probed this issue, they found out that the documents were typed in Calibri. The main punch is that the documents were of 2006 and Calibri font was introduced in January 2007. It was very easy to identify that the documents were forged.
It was after the documents were sent for lab examination, that this important evidence cropped up.
A lab personnel said, “Calibri was not commercially available before 31st January 2007, neither of the originals of the certified declarations is correctly dated and happy [sic] to have been created at some later point in time.”
However, things are not that easy; a Quora Screenshot was circulated on Twitter which suggested that the font was available in 2004, but in limited means. Here’s the screenshot;
This was tweeted by his daughter Maryam Nawaz Sharif as well. On the other hand, Lucas Fonts, the design-company, said that he font was delivered to Microsoft in 2004 (Finished form) but the public release happened much later.
A representative of Lucas says,
“We do not know the exact date for this public release date [but] it is [still] extremely unlikely that somebody would copy fonts from a beta environment to use in official documents.”
Let’s see whether this font has the power to crumble the government or not. What’s your take?
