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| 29 June 2004 | Tuesday | 10 Jamadi-ul-Awwal 1425 |
PPP contests Shujaat's nomination as premier: Allegations of loan default
ISLAMABAD, June 28: The People's Party Parliamentarians (PPP) on Monday contested PML president Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain's nomination as prime minister and said his candidature was violative of the Constitution for being a loan defaulter.
PPP secretary-general Raja Pervez Ashraf, Navid Qamar, Nayyar Bokhari and Chaudhry Manzoor in a joint press conference at the party secretariat said the nomination of Mr Hussain was contrary to Article 63(1-q) of the 1973 Constitution because, they said, he had managed to write off a bank loan of Rs37.89 million from the National Bank of Pakistan in 2003.
The information to this effect was provided to the National Assembly Secretariat in response to a question of Pir Aftab Hussain Shah Jillani on June 14, 2003, but the details were now missing from the assembly library as well as its secretariat, they alleged.
"The party's legal experts are in the process of preparing a reference which will soon be filed both before the superior judiciary as well as the Election Commission of Pakistan," they announced.
They also criticized the role of National Assembly speaker Chaudhry Amir Hussain, the chairman of the scrutiny committee before whom the nominations of Mr Hussain and PPP president Makhdoom Amin Fahim were filed.
They alleged that the speaker had overruled their objection saying that since Mr Hussain was continuing as an MNA, Article 63 (1-q) could not be invoked. The official document, they said, suggested that the entire Rs37.98 million loan of Punjab Sugar Mills was written off.
The directors of the sugar mills included Chaudhry Manzoor Elahi, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi, Chaudhry Gulzar Muhammad, etc., they added. They also quoted Article 63 (1-q) which said: "A person shall be disqualified from being elected or chosen as, and from being, a member of the Majlis-i-Shoora (parliament) if he has obtained a loan for an amount of Rs2 million or more from any bank, financial institution, cooperative society or cooperative body in his own name or in the name of his spouse or any of his dependents, which remains unpaid for more than one year from the due date or has got such loan written off."
The amount written off was in addition to the loan earlier waived from other financial institutions, like Muslim Commercial Bank, United Bank Limited, Bankers Equity Limited and not to mention his involvement in the famous cooperative scandal, they said.
The PPP members were of the opinion that the speaker should have taken a suo motu notice by sending a reference to the election commission the moment the latest information regarding writing off the loan from the National Bank was provided to the lower hose through a question. They deplored that President Pervez Musharraf had named a person as a stop-gap successor to Mr Jamali in violations of all rules, laws and moral values.
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