Hot off the racks is the latest gig on how to catch a thief! And it is expected to fly. Giving the kibosh to a traditional investigation, here’s what the Justice Department has done in Enron’s case: Michael Kopper, 37, a lower-level executive, surreptitiously singled out and weaned away from the fat cats, was grilled in secret for months, his ‘singing’ scrupulously scrutinized by gimlet-eyed legal experts which eventually exposed the world’s worst case of corporate greed.

Radiant is the evidence scooped through one single cell that is compelling enough for the Bush administration to quickly reel in the big fish, confiscate their movable and immovable assets, dispose them off and deposit the money in a bank that will return it to the victims who have lost millions. For his part, the rapacious Michael Kopper has already returned his bilked $12 million. In his plea bargain, he gets a lighter sentence in return for becoming “the critical insider to link all of the paper together...they (government) may have a million documents, but you absolutely have to have the critical human linkage of what people said when they were at a meeting, what actions they proposed to take that aren’t reflected on the paper,” says a top former federal prosecutor.

Kopper has expanded the net by graphically describing to his investigators conversations that open areas of further inquiry into the financial malfeasance of some other senior Enron executives.

Shimmering at the heart of corruption is the putative ‘human linkage’.

How may times has the press in Pakistan carried stories by insiders on verbal orders barked by sitting prime ministers to their majordomos to do their dirty work? Let’s go a notch lower and recall how some powerful federal secretaries working for the prime ministers and their relatives were continually exposed by the press for contemptible thievery. Each time I wrote about absconder Salman Farooqui — the permanent henchman of the people in power — he would slap a legal notice on my face, not to mention harangue me to the point of making me feel like a heel! Now NAB wants this guy — holed up somewhere in the US. But don’t be at all surprised if he or others like him show up to take charge of a high office should BB or MNS get re-elected!

Iced are the records seized whenever an incumbent prime minister got kicked out. Otherwise, would we not have heard the skeletons rattle in some dank cupboard of the accountability cell that sadly has a new joker preside over the flotsam of corruption, each time a government changes? There were these kowtowing principal secretaries (one of them even did jail time) whose fax machines whirred orders to petty-level officials in charge of transfers and postings all over the provinces, at the behest of their bosses and spouses. Records of their high jinks proving abuse of power must still be around gathering worms with NAB, because many weasels eventually became whistle-blowers.

On this evidence alone, Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif and their claque of corrupt can without a stir be politically pulverized. While BB and MNS holler from afar, their clan of crooks, who we all know, have broken the law many times over. Indeed, NAB and all other defenders of our moral clarity should be ashamed of themselves for failing to do their job properly. We need a new set of sleuth-hounds, legal specialists and forensic experts charged with the task to name and sentence the corrupt in all four branches of the executive, legislature, judiciary and the armed forces. But remember, only a hands-off attitude can work. No meddling from any quarter should be brooked.

Even Bush has been forced to okay a bill sponsored by Senator Sarbanes to set up a new accounting oversight board in a bid to reform corporate America. The various watchdog Congressional committees have done a remarkable job in cross-examining these barons of bankruptcy. Ballyhooed is the newly-regulated law that made Aug 14 the deadline for some 680 CEOs to sign off on all financial statements of their corporations. If later caught with accounting trickery, the errant CEO makes prison his home for the next 20 years.

Millionairess Martha Stewart, the housewife who started her business from her kitchen, is being stewed for insider trading. Her friend, the Imclone CEO, Sam Waksul, sold his company stocks as soon as he found out that his cancer drug was not being approved by the FDA (Food & Drug Authority) and the “Queen of Class”, as she’s known, slyly followed suit and jettisoned her stock.

Trip and you are dead as a dodo with the unforgiving American electorate pummelling the final nail in your political coffin. Voters here have zero tolerance for the greedy and always snatch the government back from them. Not so in Pakistan. My friends in the media, having written mountain-high columns against the corruption of BB and MNS, are now the first to cry murder when Musharraf says he won’t allow both to contest the elections.

While it’s foolish to compare the American system with Pakistan, a beginning has to be made somewhere, sometime.

A fleeting glance at the rotten repertoire of candidates readying themselves at the hustings is enough to sink anyone’s heart.

Blame it on the corrupt system that has stymied any honest attempt at proceeding against law-breakers. Millions have gone into setting up secretariats with bureaucrats burning the midnight oil, when all that is needed is a vibrant press (which we already have), informed, sharp and active citizenry; diligent legal experts, a morphed Intelligence Bureau (not those awful Brig Imtiaz Billa types of hoodlums) and honest investigating agents accountable only to an independent, autonomous and permanent secretariat...and please, spare us euphemisms such as ‘ehtesab’ and ‘NAB’.

Another vast tract of corruption is tax evasion in hundreds of creative ways. In America, the most serious crime after murder is cheating on your taxes. The IRS (Internal Revenue Service) skins people alive who are caught cheating. They have a well-laid out net for tax evaders and booby traps to snare the cheats. The income tax ladder starts with the President and the First Lady. The couple, for example, paid $250,200 in federal income tax on their income of $811,100 grossed last year.

Does the nation know how much the President of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, and the First Lady paid to the Pakistani exchequer in taxes last year? Or his governor-generals and federal ministers for that matter? We certainly know of the shameful sums (some miserly hundreds!) paid as income tax by BB, MNS and Farooq Leghari.

During Nawaz Sharif’s second term, the most miserable man in his cabinet was the late international banker, Mueenuddin Khan. Charged with fixing the chronically-corrupt Central Board of Revenue (CBR), Khan met his Waterloo at the hands of Lahore’s Liberty Market louts whom he rounded up from their Gulberg shops for tax default. Within minutes, Punjab supremo, Shahbaz Sharif, was on the phone with big brother, who angrily ordered Khan to back off or else. A red-faced Khan was never the same again...he quietly skunked away into a corner. And guess what? Every evening a spook from the IB sitting in his dark-tinted glass car would be waiting outside his apartment building in the diplomatic area in Islamabad to spy on Khan’s nocturnal activities.