New York: Declan Walsh, the New York Times reporter who unearthed Pakistani IT company Axact’s global fake degree empire, has made some more disclosures in his recent article.
The article started with a question: Just how was Axact, a company that billed itself as Pakistan’s biggest software firm but seemed to have few products, making its money?
“Despite Axact’s claims, nobody seemed quite sure what sort of software the company was selling, or to whom,” Walsh writes in his article.
The reporter writes that he spent three months putting together the story of Axact’s selling of fake academic degrees and how the company strengthened its ‘business’.
He claimed that former Axact employees were key elements to his reporting.
“One, speaking by phone from Karachi, confided that the company’s main business was in fake degrees. He listed a handful of bogus universities — with names like Belford, Rochville and Must — that a quick Internet search confirmed had already faced accusations of providing fake certificates.”
He said Yasir Jamshaid, a disillusioned former quality control official at the company, who had fled Pakistan to the United Arab Emirates.
He claimed that he carried out his investigation through chasing former employees, trawling through newspaper clippings, company registrations on blogs, Internet registration services and court records.
“A picture started to emerge: Axact looked like a company that had gone to great efforts to shield its involvement in the fake degree business; it had done so principally through an elaborate web of interconnected offshore companies used to process revenues and payments and, above all, to keep the Karachi headquarters at arm’s length from Axact’s Internet empire.”
He said patterns of fake degree websites and crumbs of hundreds of fake education websites pointed toward Axact.
Following publication of his story, Interior Minister, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, ordered an investigation into Axact. Hours later, officials raided Axact headquarters in Karachi and a smaller office in the capital, Islamabad, seizing computers and detaining at least 30 employees for questioning.
