Microsoft font Calibri may take down Pakistan's prime minister

The Microsoft font Calibri has now become a key piece of evidence in a corruption investigation surrounding Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, reports The Verge. According to investigators, the documents handed over by the prime minister’s daughter, Maryam Nawaz Sharif, were typed up in the font Calibri. But the twist in the tale is that these documents were dated from 2006 — and Calibri was not widely available during that time which indicates that the documents were forged. According to The Express Tribune, Pakistan’s court-appointed investigators sent the documents off to a lab for examination where the discrepancy was noticed. One of the experts from the lab was quoted saying: “Calibri was not commercially available before January 31, 2007 ... neither of the originals of the certified declarations are correctly dated and have [sic] to have been created at some later point in time.” But there is a catch, Calibri was in existence before 2006 but its availability was very limited. Rejecting the investigators' findings, Maryam has retweeted a screenshot of a Quora page that says Calibri had been available in Windows beta as early as 2004. It is yet not clear whether that date is accurate however, Calibri appears “to have been available in some limited form” when Maryam's documents are alleged to have been produced. The company that created Calibri, LucasFonts, told Pakistan's Dawn that the font was delivered to Microsoft in its finished form in 2004 and that the first public betas which contained it were released 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," added a LucasFonts representative. This investigation goes back to the 2016 Panama Papers leak. It disclosed details of countless clients from around the world who hired a law firm, Mossack Fonseca, to handle their offshore accounts. The children of Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif were among those clients. The leak displays “holdings that the Sharif family had failed to publicly declare”. Pakistan Supreme Court then ordered a group of investigators to look into the matter. According to Reuters, the investigators believe that the Sharif family “had more assets than they declared and faked documents to hide it”. Many are not demanding the prime minister's resignation, however the Sharifs are adamant in their stance.