03 January 2004	Saturday	10 Ziqa'ad 1424

ISLAMABAD, Jan 2: The president of the Supreme Court Bar Association Justice (rtd) Tariq Mahmud has strongly criticised the reported induction of the outgoing Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to the post of chairman of the National Accountability Bureau.

Talking to newsmen on the sidelines of the SAFMA conference on Friday as president of the SCBA, Justice (retd) Tariq Mahmood said it would be yet another joke to induct a person, whose integrity and honesty was not aboveboard, to lead the accountability process going on under NAB.

He said that the SCBA had released a fact sheet about the said CJ in which he was described as a thoroughly corrupt person, to which the CJ neither took any notice nor defended himself against those charges.

Responding to a query about whether Gen Musharraf had legally and constitutionally become the president after obtaining a vote of confidence by a simple majority of the electoral college, he said the process of the vote of confidence was itself illegal, and one could not become legal by an illegal process.

He said, the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal has wrongly entered into a compromise about giving the general the vote of confidence to grant legitimacy to him. He added, that since the MMA has already admitted it had reached a compromise under coercion, the whole process becomes illegal and unworthy of acceptance.

He said no one in the world would accept such an arrangement which was made on gunpoint and by using the leverage of the army.