Microsoft's font allegedly exposes Pakistan corruption

One of the most famous Microsoft fonts is ‘Calibri’ at the moment. The humanist sans-serif typeface was designed by Lucas de Groot back in 2004 and was widely available to the public following January 30, 2007. While this piece of information may seem irrelevant to you — it turns out to be a key piece of evidence in a corruption investigation surrounding Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif.

Microsoft' Calibri font

This investigation dates back to 2016 Panama Papers leak which reveals “details of customers using a law firm to handle offshore accounts,” reported The Verge.  The children of Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif were among those customers, and they showed holdings that the Sharif family had failed to publicly declare. Investigators believe that his family had more assets than they declared and faked documents to hide it, according to Reuters. The country’s Supreme Court ordered a group of investigators to look into the matter, culminating the report produced this week, the report added. During the investigation, the officials noticed that the documents-in-question were typed up in Calibri. Since Calibri wasn’t widely available back in 2006, the investigators find it easy to believe that the documents were forged.

According to Express Tribune, the documents were sent off to the lab for examination by Pakistan’s court-appointed investigators. It is the lab officials that noticed the discrepancy.  “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,” said one of the lab personnel. However, the situation is much more complicated than it is believed to be. Pakistan Prime Minsiter’s daughter, Maryam Nawaz Sharif tweeted a screenshot of a Quora page that stated that Calibri existed on Windows beta since 2004. According to Dawn, citing design-company Lucas Fonts states that Calibri was delivered to Microsoft in finished form in 2004. However, the first public-beta was made available in 2006. “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," said a representative for LucasFonts.