The Islamabad High Court (IHC) on Tuesday suspended jail term of Axact’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Shoaib Sheikh in a fake degrees case. Sheikh was granted bail by IHC against surety bonds worth Rs500,000. Justice Athar Minallah of IHC conducted the hearing and granted bail to Axact CEO Shoaib Sheikh. Earlier the Sessions Court of Islamabad had convicted Shoaib Sheikh and 22 others in the fake degree scam case and awarded 20 years imprisonment and fine of Rs1.3 million on each.
Amidst the hearing, Shaikh’s counsel Raja Rizwan Abbasi asked the court to suspend the sentence till the appeal against the trial court’s decision in concluded. In his arguments, the lawyer pointed to what he called some grave legal mistakes in the decision. Justice Athar Minallah observed that there was no complainant in the case. The judge also observed that the prosecution failed to prove that the degrees were fake.
In its report, New York Times had stated in 2105 that Axact, secretive Pakistani software company, had created a series of fake websites involving “professors” and students to earn millions of dollars from scams involving fake degrees, non-existent online universities and manipulation of customers.
In its report submitted to the sessions court, the FIA alleged that evidence forensically extracted from Axact’s databases between 2010 to 2015 showed that diplomas and degrees of fake universities based in the US had been issued to over 240,000 students of different countries, Dawn reported.
Axact Case
On 17 May 2015, The New York Times published an investigative story reporting that Axact ran at least 370 degree and accreditation mill websites. The report said that although the company did sell software, chiefly website design and smartphone applications, its main business was “to take the centuries-old scam of selling fake academic degrees and turn it into an Internet-era scheme on a global scale.” The Times further reported that the company had around 2,000 employees, some of whom pretended to be American educational officials and worked in shifts to keep the company open 24 hours per day.
The offices of the company were sealed and it’s CEO and senior officials were arrested after the issue surfaced.
Umair Hamid, a senior manager of the company was sentenced to 21 months in a US prison in August 2017 for his part in Axact’s fraudulent activities. According to the US Department of Justice’s website, Hamid pled guilty on April 6 this year to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. “He entered the guilty plea before a US District judge who imposed today’s sentence.”
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