Declan Walsh releases documents related to Axact investigation

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AFP
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Declan Walsh releases documents related to Axact investigation
New York Times journalist Declan Walsh has released documents related to the paper’s investigation of Pakistani IT company Axact. The NYT in a report claimed that Axact had made millions from selling fake degrees through online school websites.

Listed below are some of the documents which were released by Walsh.

1.Disgruntled American students of two major fake degree mills, Belford High School and Belford University, brought a class-action lawsuit in an American court in 2009. It ended three years later with a $22.7m judgment against the schools. During the hearings, a Karachi man named Salem Kureshi claimed to be the owner of the schools and denied any link to Axact. But these two documents — registration documents for the schools’ mailboxes in Texas and California – show that their mail was being forwarded to Axact’s Karachi headquarters.






2.The Texas mailbox was opened by a Karachi man named Syed Asim Hashmi. This internal Axact publication, published four years later in 2010, lists him on page 19 as a former employee.






3.Screen grabs from the video testimony of Salem Kureshi and his associate “John Smith”.






4.Screen grab from Google Maps of the address given by the bogus accreditation body, International Accreditation Organization.





5. Copy of article by technology journalist Molouk Ba-Isa in the Arab News, dated October 6 2009, that identifies Axact’s Karachi office as the source of fake degrees being posted abroad via Dubai. The article was later pulled from the Internet following a legal threat from Axact’s lawyers, although never formally retracted. Distributed here with Ms. Ba-Isa’s permission.