Pakistan Releases Toshakhana Records Revealing Extraordinary Gifts Received by Top Leaders

ISLAMABAD: A sugar bowl. A model of Masjid-e-Nabawi (ﷺ). A replica of China's space station. All three sat on the same list Friday, when the Cabinet Division published its Toshakhana record for April to June this year.

Twenty-one gifts in total, spread across the country's most senior officials. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar were named among them.

Pakistan Toshakhana Gifts

Sharif's share included a sugar bowl, a costly pen, the Masjid-e-Nabawi (ﷺ) model, a shield, and a necktie. He also received a model of a Chinese space station, a cup, a watch, and a second shield nine items, by the Cabinet Division's count, all logged under his name for the quarter.

Dar's list looked nothing like it. A leather belt from China. A model of an Egyptian statue. Cufflinks. Three gifts, none overlapping with the prime minister's.

Neither official kept anything. Both deposited their gifts with the Toshakhana, the state repository built to hold exactly this kind of item anything a foreign government or dignitary hands to a Pakistani official above a certain declared value. The Cabinet Division has not said who gave what, or on which occasion. That detail is missing from the release, and it usually is.

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What happens next is the part worth watching. The Cabinet Division says it's still working out how much these gifts are worth. That valuation matters because it decides whether Sharif or Dar can eventually buy any of these items back and at what price. Pakistan's Toshakhana rules on that question have shifted more than once in recent years, and the Cabinet Division hasn't said which version applies to this batch. Until the valuation is published, nobody outside the Division actually knows.

This isn't the Toshakhana's first turn in the spotlight. Former prime minister Imran Khan spent much of the last two years fighting a case built almost entirely around this same repository allegations that he bought Toshakhana gifts back at prices far below what they were worth. That case is the reason any Toshakhana disclosure now gets read closely, line by line, regardless of who's named in it.

Friday's list won't carry that kind of weight on its own. A mosque model and a space station replica sitting in the same paragraph make for an odd image, not a scandal. But the pattern gifts arrive, officials declare them, the state assesses their worth, and only sometimes does anyone find out what "assessed worth" actually meant is the same pattern that dragged Khan through court.

For now, the Cabinet Division has released the list and nothing else. No valuation figures. No donor names. No date for when either might arrive. Sharif and Dar have done what the rules require: declared the gifts, handed them over, and waited, like everyone else, for the Division to put a number on them.