THE talks between the government and the parliamentary opposition have fallen into a predictable pattern: the hard bargaining appears to be centred on the Panama Papers and who is to be investigated and who isn`t and not on reforms or systemic improvements. Clearly, the revelations in the Panama Papers have raised both legal and ethical questions of the country`s political and business elite, and none more so than of the family of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Determining if any laws have been violated and assigning guilt is of great importance if Pakistan is ever to have a better, more responsive, people-oriented democracy, the political leadership of the country needs to be held to progressively higher standards of conduct. Yet, the Panama Papers can and should be about more than simply determining if an elected prime minister and the political and business elite have violated the law of the land.

Are the applicable laws adequate, and what does public policy have to say about the vast sums of money that are under the control of a small group of individuals? Those are broader questions that perhaps should be included in the ToRs or debated inside parliament.

The national debate over offshore companies owned by wealthy Pakistanis is led by a public expressing its desire to see that wealth earned inside Pakistan is put to use inside the country for productive purposes. To achieve that by way of old-fashioned capital controls or criminalising legitimate individual choices of wealthy individuals would be counterproductive. But surely the overall economic incentive structure can be looked at to determine why wealthy Pakistanis opt for offshore companies and tax havens. Is the Federal Board of Revenue inside Pakistan a predatory organisation? Are investment and business opportunities inside Pakistan bottled up? What are the conflicts of interest when public officials and political leaders are also owners of vast commercial businesses? Unhappily, neither parliament nor the teams negotiating the ToRs appear much concerned about the public policy aspects of the Panama Papers. It may well be that in the course of the judicial commission`s works, new information will come to light that will suggest the need for legislative or administrative action. The judicial commission that investigated the claims of electoral fraud in the 2013 general election exposed a number of flaws in the electoral process and made sensible recommendations to fix the problems uncovered. Ideally, the Panama Papers inquiry would lead to a range of recommendations for public policy to consider. But are our elected representatives really interested in that?