| THE NEWS INTERNATIONAL Saturday, July 03, 2010 Shameful!
A sum of US$8000 has been paid out to five Turkish girls, hired as 'lady guides' to 'facilitate' an entourage led by President Asif Ali Zardari which visited the country in 2008. There is no real information as to what these girls were hired for or what the nature of any services they provided may have been. An FO spokesman has suggested they were interpreters; other accounts say they were 'guides'. Everyone is of course free to reach their own conclusions. The fact they were hired from an unregistered tour operator, without the knowledge of the ambassador to Turkey at the time, may give further clues. The clandestine – and rather sleazy--nature of the whole affair was made worse by the failure to pay the girls until the intervention of a Turkish court.
We can, after reading the report, only wonder at our leaders. Their lifestyle appears to resemble that of debauched emperors from Roman times. According to reports in this publication quite astonishing sums of money have been spent on hotel rooms, meals, and – it would appear – other forms of entertainment by our representatives on their travels overseas. These travels are frequent and take our representatives far afield. All this continues as people at home struggle to put bread on the table or live with anything resembling the dignity that every human deserves. How long will this continue? Such goings-on are damaging not only to the exchequer but also to the image of our country. We should be ashamed that they continue without check.
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