ISLAMABAD: The British forensic handwriting document examination expert, one of the prosecution witnesses in the Avenfield Apartments reference, in his written statement recorded before Judge Mohammad Bashir of the accountability court has testified that there were three ways of downloading Calibri font before its formal launch in January 2007.

Robert William Radley, who had identified the use of Calibri font in the trust deed of the property during the Panama Papers case probe by a Joint Investigation Team, told the accountability court that Calibri was one of the types of clear fonts that Microsoft had introduced in 2005.

Mr Radley had earlier reported that the trust deed signed by Maryam Nawaz was prepared in Calibri font in February 2006 while the font was “not commercially available” at that time.

In his written statement recorded before the judge of the accountability court, a copy of which is available with Dawn,

Mr Radley explained that Calibri had been available since 2005 but it became one of the default fonts of Microsoft Word in 2007.

He said Microsoft had introduced six types of clear fonts, including Calibri, in 2005 and the same year its creator, Lucas De Groot, was given an award in Type Director Club (TDC) Competition for designing Calibri font.

Radley says he found discrepancies in the Avenfield trust deed document that he mentioned in forensic report

According to the statement, there were at least three ways of downloading Calibri for writing purpose after its pre-release in 2005.

Mr Radley admitted that Calibri not only existed but also was in use of tens of thousands of people, as it had been released before its formal launch for testing purpose.

The prosecution witness said the “operator has to have a very good knowledge of IT and would have to know the presence of how to use installation procedure, risk assessment to the computer.

“If the operator had sufficient knowledge as stated above then he could download the pre-release Window Vista Beta-1 version which had the Calibri font embedded.”

He said: “The second possibility for downloading pre-release Window Vista Beta-1 was when the user organisation downloads BETAS Discs (Beta Tester) or be within certain organisation to download BETAS.”

He said: “The third possibility for downloading pre-release Window Vista Beta-1 was that the user must have technical ability to download and run on, say an existing XP machine subject to the observations and conditions.”

The forensic expert said that though he did not go through the contents of each of the two pages of the said documents rather he used the method of Video Spectral Comparator (VSC) to determine if documents were identical or not.

He explained that VSC was a multipurpose machine that could conduct analysis of ink including infra red luminescence, infra red reflectance of inks. These were different methods for differentiating inks, he added.

On the basis of this analysis, the witness said, he found some discrepancies in the trust deed that he had mentioned in the report.

Mr Radley explained he “used VSC in respect of two scanned documents presented for comparison for purpose of superimposition of the documents. I have modified the size of documents…for purpose of ascertaining whether they were identical or not.”

The witness stated: “I completed examination and wrote the report within a short period of time otherwise my report would have been 10 times greater.”

He, however, made it clear that “shortage of time did not affect the accuracy/quality of the report but it affected the extent that I could explain every point.”

Published in Dawn, February 25th, 2018