ISLAMABAD, Dec 10: In a battle to salvage their reputations, Senator Mushahid Hussain and the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) have pitted themselves against each other with claims and counter-claims.
The NAB credibility was put at stake when the ruling PML secretary-general contested the official record placed in Senate by the bureau which specifically said the government had investigated Mr Mushahid for "misuse of authority" and the case against him was closed on May 11, 2002, just four months before the October elections that year.
By denying on the floor of the upper house on November 30 that there was no case against him, Senator Mushahid tried to dispel a perception in political circles that the case was closed under a deal with the military authorities charting out the future political map for restoration of "genuine democracy."
It took almost a week for the NAB, with all its financial resources and institutional strength, to take a decision and formally challenge the veracity of the statement made by Senator Mushahid in the Senate in which he claimed that on January 25, 2000, former NAB prosecutor-general Farooq Adam had made a statement before Justice Nawaz Abbassi of the Lahore High Court's Rawalpindi bench that the bureau had no case against him.
The bureau spokesman's press conference reported in Friday's newspapers quoted him as categorically denying that the then prosecutor-general had given any clean chit to Mushahid before the court.
When Dawn contacted and asked the politicians about the reasons for NAB choosing to go public in the case, they were at a loss to understand the logic of NAB challenging the parliament's sovereign jurisdiction by holding a press conference and clarifying its position on a matter which had already been referred to a Senate standing committee.
Senator Farhatullah Babar of People's Party Parliamentarians said the NAB spokesman should not have commented on the matter once the issue had been referred to the standing committee.
He said once a matter had been referred to a standing committee, all other instruments even within the parliament became redundant. He said the NAB had clearly encroached upon the parliament's jurisdiction by making a public statement on the case after it had been referred to the committee.
In a rebuttal to NAB spokesman's press conference, Senator Mushahid stuck to the line of argument he had advocated earlier in the Senate and claimed he wanted to set the record straight regarding the "wrong statement" made by the NAB spokesman.
To prove his point, the senator claimed that the press published a report on December 19, 1999 that NAB had no case against him and the same statement was repeated by the then NAB prosecutor-general in a court on January 25, 2000. Senator Mushahid further claimed that both the statements were part of the "published record" and had never been refuted or rebutted.
To defend its case and keeping in view the important current position of Senator Mushahid as ruling party's secretary-general, the government has taken the plea that a "secret investigation" had been carried out against the senator in a case of misuse of authority and, perhaps, he did not know about the investigations carried out against him.
The details of the case and other charges on the basis of which investigations were carried out were initially based on auditor-general of Pakistan's reports relating to Senator Mushahid stint as former prime minister Nawaz Sharif's information minister.
Although "nothing substantial" was found in those cases, as claimed by the government now, the details of those reports are likely to be presented before the Senate Standing Committee on Breach of Privileges when it meets on December 22.
