News graphic of former Pakistan finance minister's 'IMF loan quote' is fabricated
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on January 1, 2024 at 08:17
- 3 min read
- By AFP Pakistan
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The purported news graphic was shared more than 5,000 times after being posted here on X on December 26, 2023.
It was shared ahead of national elections slated for February 2024 and addresses the country's biting economic downturn that has seen Pakistanis struggling through record devaluation of the rupee and soaring inflation.
An Urdu-language quote, attributed to former finance minister Miftah Ismail, reads: "The loan taken from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was not used to give relief to the masses but it was distributed among the media and every member of the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM).
"This loan is being paid back by the nation now and people are suffering from inflation because of this."
Ismail served as finance chief for the PDM coalition between April and September 2022.
The coalition government agreed the terms of the IMF deal in July 2023 to avoid default as it battled to turn around an economy hobbled by decades of mismanagement and instability (archived link).
The global lender demanded that popular subsidies cushioning living costs be slashed, and petrol and electricity prices have rocketed.
The graphic was shared by journalist Imran Riaz Khan, who is considered a prominent supporter of jailed former prime minister Imran Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party.
The same graphic was also shared elsewhere on X here, here and here, and on Facebook here, here and here.
But the image is not a genuine news graphic.
'Absolutely fake'
Referring to the graphic, Ismail said on his official X account: "1. This is not true. 2: I have never said this" (archived link).
A search for Ismail's purported quote on Google did not turn up any results.
Leading TV news channel Dunya News, whose logo appears on the mocked-up graphic, also told AFP the media organisation did not publish the image.
"It is absolutely fake. We did not issue any such news," the channel's news director Aziz Ahmad Khan said on December 27.
A comparison of the purported Dunya News graphic and genuine graphics used by the channel on its Facebook page shows significant differences in the style and layout.
Below is a screenshot comparison between the falsely shared graphic (left) and a genuine news graphic from Dunya News from December 30 (right):
A reverse image search on Google of the photo of Ismail used in the mocked-up graphic led to the same image used in an article published by the Dawn newspaper here on March 15, 2022 (archived link).
At the time, Ismail was an opposition legislator.
Below is a screenshot comparison of Ismail's photo in the false post (left) and the photo published in the Dawn newspaper article (right):
The photo caption reads, "PML-N leader Miftah Ismail addresses a press conference in Karachi. — DawnNewsTV".
According to the Dawn report, Ismail said then-prime minister Imran Khan and his team deliberately stalled an agreement with the IMF to undermine the economy and weaken the next government.
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