More attention needs to be paid to the Syrian Grand Mufti’s charges that the Middle East is being destabilised by Western forces I met the Grand Mufti of Syria, Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun, in Damascus a few months after he had lost his son in a terror attack in 2012. Impeccably turned out with his turban and flowing robes, he looked understandably distraught. Those were the early days of the Syrian civil war and there was a struggle to interpret and analyse why violence was sneakily spreading in a secular country where President Bashar al-Assad was visibly popular. The Grand Mufti, who is considered one of the top three people in Syria, was uncertain why assassins targeted his 21-year-old son who was still studying in university, and was to get married the day he was killed. The answers came to him when he finally met his son’s killers. In one of his media interviews, he revealed how the two killers had no clue to either the identity of his son or motive. They were given the registration number of his car and a paltry amount of British pounds—350 each. His son’s life was worth only 700 pounds, the Mufti had said ruefully. After meeting his son’s killers, who were barely out of their teens, the Mufti pleaded with the authorities that they should be freed, but they had to face due process of law. Since then, the Mufti has seen his beloved country bloodied by a war heaped on its people by competing regional and global ambitions. He was recently in Delhi where he grandly announced that the five-year war, which has left more than 4,00,000 people dead and dislocated millions of others, was about to end. With relief and joy written on his face, the Grand Mufti described in detail how the secular Syrian Arab Army with the help of allies had defeated terrorists from over 40 countries. He blamed some of Syria’s neighbours and world powers for the endless war that the Middle East region had been subjected to. He claimed that these terrorists belonging to Daesh and other outfits like Nusra were recruited from different countries. There were many women, too, who were lured into this mythical Islamic State led by a Khalifa through Facebook or other social media platforms. The Mufti said that the fighters had abandoned the women from Chechnya, Tunisia, Jordan and some European countries after they began to lose their hold over towns in the last few months. He also hinted that some fighters had been mysteriously air-lifted by helicopters to safe places. Perhaps the Grand Mufti was lending credence to the allegations by Russian armed forces that before the fall of Dier-al-Zor, Syria’s seventh largest city, unmarked aircraft had pulled out hardcore Islamic State fighters to safer havens. The implications of the Mufti’s charge and that of the Russian armed forces are serious. There are obvious suggestions that the Islamic State was able to attain much success due to the support it received from covert operatives belonging to Western powers and their allies in the region. Another example of this relationship, as pointed out by the Russian Defence Ministry, is the circumstances in which a three-star General was killed while on military duty in Syria. The Russians claimed that the location and coordinates of the General were provided to terrorists working together with US troops. There have been no denials of these charges, but the bizarre manner in which the Arab Spring became a reason for regime changes in the Middle East by reviving old ethnic and sectarian fault lines has lessons for many societies, according to the Grand Mufti. He wanted India, a secular society that was under colonial rule like Syria, to remain vigilant about forces that wanted to disrupt settled societies. He gave the example of the Rohingya crisis that, in his reckoning, was getting inordinate publicity in the Western media. He believed the crisis was being used to destabilise not just Myanmar, but also China and India. Interestingly, the Mufti also visited Lucknow, which is a major centre of Islamic learning. Here he spoke about the need to rise above the sectarian divide between Shias and Sunnis, and look ahead and not backwards for inspiration. In these times, when sectarian issues are reordering the Islamic World, the Mufti’s message gains great importance. The big question is—will he be on the winning side?   

The tranche of documents uncovered recently has not only brought several stalwarts of Indian politics, cinema industry, and business tycoons under scanner but has also thrown up pertinent questions over the moral dilemmas of avoiding tax

The paradise in the Paradise Papers refers to tax havens of low or even no taxation. Such havens usually are shadowy and sleazy little countries and principalities such as the Cayman Islands, Lichtenstein and Monaco, and sometimes entities within countries like Jersey, Guernsey, Bermuda in the UK and Delaware and Puerto Rico in the USA. Then there are low taxation countries like Switzerland, Singapore and Dubai that assure secretive rich people of their privacy. 

Essentially a tax haven exists to cheat sovereign states of their lawful incomes. The Tax Justice Network campaign group estimates that corporate tax avoidance costs governments $500bn a year, while personal tax avoidance costs $200bn a year. This in effect means that anywhere between $20-30 trillion of business transactions are sheltered from taxations. Moody’s estimated that in 2016 giant American technology companies such as Google, Microsoft and Apple were hoarding about $1.84 trillion cash in offshore havens. Clearly they are avoiding tax and as bending the rules of the tax system is not illegal unlike tax evasion; they are operating within the letter, but perhaps not the spirit, of the law.

In the early 1980’s, shaken up by the number of scandals in Wall Street, and by the number of its MBA graduates who were found wanting in ethical and moral values, the Harvard Business School made a course on “Leadership and Corporate Accountability” a core requirement. I am sure Jayant Sinha, a Harvard MBA, had to do this course and would have scored a high grade in it. Such courses now are in the core curriculum of the business schools attended by the other two young politicians also named in the Paradise Papers or capers if you will. Sachin Pilot graduated from the famous Wharton School of Business and Karti Chidambaram took his business masters from Texas and a law degree from Cambridge to boot.

Doing the required ethics course is one thing but it is quite something else to be able to resolve moral dilemmas of what John Kenneth Galbraith described as the “HBS’s ethical view of capitalism which derives straight out of the Protestant ethic and its transformational view of money, in which the ability to accumulate wealth is a reflection of one’s character.”

The charge against Jayant Sinha is that while acting as an Omidyar Network representative was on the board of a California company that made a loan to that company’s Cayman subsidiary. Usually such a loan to such a subsidiary suggests a fiddle. Whether Sinha knew this or did not know it is something else? Clearly the evidence does not suggest any malfeasance. But clearly there is room for skepticism. 

Omidyar Network proclaims its belief: “Just as eBay created the opportunity for millions of people to start their own businesses, we believe market forces can be a potent driver for positive social change.” Grand words but that hardly conceals the true goal that is to make bucks, sometimes fast ones too.  Again as Galbraith put it: “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

Jayant, then fresh out of one of the IIT’s, worked with me way back in the mid 1980’s on a paper that proposed the mass construction of smokeless challahs for rural homes as a profitable employment for hundreds of thousands of rural workers. I remember it as a bit of an elaborate scheme that also computed the savings due to improved health results. It was published in this newspaper and the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi took note of it. I was impressed enough to write a recommendation when he applied for a Masters in Energy Management at Pennsylvania. 

I next met him when I was serving as his fathers Advisor in the Finance Ministry. Jayant and his wife were both working with foreign companies investing in Indian stocks. He was apprehensive about a proposal made by me to disinvest PSU stocks by selling them to the governments banks for onward restructure and disinvestment. The minister had clearly spoken to him. At that time too I wondered if the HBS’s core business ethics course would have seen conflict of interest issues in it? The minister however had plenty of flex in him.

To my mind tax avoidance is just as reprehensible as tax evasion. Sinha was too junior in the Finance Ministry to have expressed views on this. It would have been unlikely though for that is not the HBS way. The previous Finance Minister, himself a Harvard MBA, would not have any left footprints for young Sinha to tread on. Neither would the present lawyer Finance Minister.