REAL LIFE NEWS: HOW THE WRONG TYPEFACE BROUGHT DOWN A PRIME MINISTER
by Hazed
Last year, the Prime Minister of Pakistan Nawaz Sharif was ousted from his job on charges of corruption. What’s interesting is that a key part of the evidence in the case against him was about the typeface used in a document.
It hinged on a document that Sharif’s family produced which was meant to distance the PM from questions about who owned four expensive London properties. The document was dated 2006, but eagle-eyed investigators appointed by the court noticed something dodgy about it: the typeface used was Calibri, the default font used in Microsoft documents – but that typeface didn’t become commercially available until after 2006!
Calibri first made its appearance in pre-release beta versions in 2004, but was not commercially available until January 31 2007. Therefore the document could not have been created in 2006, so was judged to be a forgery.
This was enough to prove the case against Sharif and oust him from office.
A typographer’s joke: Pakistan was then said to be “Sans Sharif.”
Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/how-a-microsoft-font-brought-down-pakistani-prime-minister-nawaz-sharif/article35828938/
Note: This story was published a year ago, but I only came across it recently, and thought it was amusing enough to write about despite its age.