LAHORE (Haider Ali) – There is a viral list circulating over social media declaring Premier Nawaz Sharif as the second most corrupt politician in the world but have you wondered who compiled the list declaring Nawaz Sharif as the second most corrupt politician.
Let us expose the reality behind the flawed rankings. The list has been uploaded by a website “The Mesh News”. The website which enlisted Russia’s Vladimir Putin as No. 1 in corruption did not provide any statistics or data to ratify the rankings.
Along with Nawaz Sharif, politicians from India, North Korea, Guinea, Ukraine, UAE, Iceland and Saudi Arabia have also been included in the “Top 10 Most Corrupt Politicians In The World 2016“.
The most surprising name in the list was of David Cameron, who is the former Prime Minister of United Kingdom. The list ranked David as the 6th most corrupt politician but to your surprise, not a single convincing charge of corruption has been proved against him.
The only rational accusation against David was after the Panama papers truce when he admitted that he benefited from Panama-based offshore trust set up by his late father but sold it for around £30,000 before he became Prime Minister .
| Rank | Name | Country |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Vladimir Putin | Russia |
| 2 | Nawaz Sharif | Pakistan |
| 3 | King Salman bin Abdulaziz | Saudi Arabia |
| 4 | Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson | Iceland |
| 5 | Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan | UAE |
| 6 | David Cameron | United Kingdom |
| 7 | Petro Poroshenko | Ukraine |
| 8 | Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo | Guinea |
| 9 | Kim Jong UN | North Korea |
| 10 | Jayalalithaa | India |
The list has been uploaded on the website with author name as “Syeda Tooba Hashmi” with no contact details or e-mail address.
In another story on the same website, “Top 10 Richest Pakistani Politicians In 2016” Nawaz Sharif with more amount of wealth has been ranked No.2 while Asif Zardari with comparatively lesser one has been ranked as Number one (As depicted in the headline below).
Hovering through the website, another article “Top 10 Most Corrupt Politician Leaders Of Pakistan In 2016” declares 6 members of ruling PML-N as corrupt out of ten, the other four are coincidently the traditional rivals of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf.
Another list put forth by the same website declared PTI supremo “Imran Khan” as the second most powerful leader in the world ignoring Angela Merkel who was actually ranked as 2nd powerful politician according to Forbes.
What adds insult to the injury of “Mesh News” credibility was the fact that the facebook page of website got only 367 likes and it’s Twitter handle has 7 followers, none of whom is a renowned journalist.
The Alexa website rank of “Mesh News” is 1480 while it’s global rank is 101,006. According to Alexa stats as many as 40 percent of the website traffic is drawn from Pakistan followed by India and US.
When this correspondent contacted the website for response regarding the statistics or data for compiling “Corrupt politicians list” the admin replied as under including multiple links from different news sources.
We Publish this post “Top 10 corrupt politicians in the world 2016” after 2 month search we cannot give statistics in the post about corruption we mention only some corruption scandal because there are a lot of corruption scandal these 10 politicians.
Upon further pressing as how the website devised the rankings and placed politicians in the list the reply came as under.
“Ranking is deiced after reviewing facts and figures we study this case 2 month after that we publish this post. its not about traffic or down alexa we ruining a lot of other website have very well rank”.
The sporadic grammatical mistakes in the website as well as in the response give a glimpse of editorial supervision with which the website is being monitored.
A series of risque articles on the same website suggests that the web portal is a classic example of clickbait journalism. With no statistics or supporting data, multiple lists devised by the website raises serious questions over the credibility of the news agency. Although it’s not confirmed but it’s highly likely that the website is being run by a political force in the country aimed at maligning the political foes for vested gains.
