Reference filed against Aziz: Steel mills sale, stock market crash
By Raja Asghar
ISLAMABAD, June 21: The opposition in the National Assembly on Thursday hit back strongly at the government with a disqualification charge-sheet, or reference, against Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, which overshadowed final stages of the last budget session of the present lower house.
While the prime minister seemed shying away from an immediate personal response to the opposition move that accused him of wrongdoing in a 2005 stock market crash and the scrapped sale of the Pakistan Steel Mills last year, a section of the ruling party came out with words and gestures against tit-for-tat references, which are likely to add to the worries of a beleaguered government in an already tense political atmosphere.
The reference, signed by 31 members from all major opposition parties, was handed to Speaker Chaudhry Amir Hussain at his chamber by seven of them while the house was discussing and voting on government’s demands for grants for its ministries as part of the budget for fiscal 2007-08 for the second day running.
“The speaker received the disqualification reference against the prime minister and sent it to the National Assembly secretariat for further necessary action,” a secretariat statement said about the matter, which the speaker must send to the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) within 30 days.
The move came a day after Mr Hussain sent to the CEC two disqualification references against Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaaf chief Imran Khan filed earlier this month by some members of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, a key government ally, and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Sher Afgan Khan Niazi on the basis of the former cricket captain’s one-time alleged affair with British heiress Sita White.
The prime minister came to the house towards the end of day’s proceedings apparently to respond to the opposition move and was called upon by the chair to take the floor immediately after the conclusion of the discussion and voting on the demands for grants for government ministries.
But in an apparent last-minute change of mind, Mr Aziz signalled by his hands that he would not speak and Speaker Hussain instead gave the floor to a Pakistan Muslim League back-bencher, Farooq Amjad Mir, to denounce what the member from the Punjab called a “tamasha” (spectacle) of references and call upon politicians to refrain from bringing ruin to one another.
He said he was giving his personal opinion rather than party line in asking both sides of the political divide to hold back from filing references against each other, but was cheered with desk-thumping from several PML back-benchers who seemed to be supporting his idea.
The opposition had vowed on Wednesday to file references against ruling party members in response to the speaker’s move in sending the references against Imran Khan, which had followed PTI chief’s moves to approach British courts against MQM leader Altaf Hussain for allegedly directing violence in Karachi.
The opposition indicated on Thursday it might come up with more references against government figures, saying the one against the prime minister was first of what one member called a process of accountability begun against the ruling party.
Its two-page document cited two grounds which it said had rendered Mr Aziz “disqualified to and remain as member of the National Assembly as he has incurred disqualification contained in articles 62 and 36 of the Constitution”.
It said the prime minister was “known to have engineered” the stock exchange crash through what it called his “front-man Arif Habib and others” and that the group “enriched themselves at the cost of public at large through fraud, forgery and manipulation”, which, according to it, was also ‘decipherable’ from a statement of the then SECP chairman Tariq Hassan.
The reference also said the prime minister “further doled away the most lucrative and strategic asset” of the country, Pakistan Steel Mills, by approving its privatisation in the cabinet and then sending the privatisation minister on leave and giving additional charge to Mr Owais Leghari and get the deal finalised through him.
It said a Supreme Court judgment that set aside the deal with a Pakistani-Russian-Saudi consortium and passed strictures against the process was “itself sufficient to disqualify” Mr Aziz as a member of the National Assembly.
The document said other unspecified disqualifications that Mr Aziz incurred “would be submitted at the time of adjudication of this reference” and that the movers reserved the right to add more ‘irrefutable charges’ later.
At a joint news conference later, one of the reference’s authors, MMA deputy secretary-general Liaquat Baloch, accused the prime minister of being directly involved in what he called corruption in the sale of Steel Mills and of heading a cartel that he said was responsible for the loss of billions of rupees to people in the stock market crash.
PPP information-secretary Sherry Rehman said the opposition move amounted to a no-confidence against the government and the prime minister and was aimed at exposing their “corruption and ill-will”.
PML-N member Khwaja Mohammad Asif said the opposition had filed an issue-based reference rather than about anybody’s personal life and added that he hoped the speaker would show the same quickness in sending it to the Election Commission as he did with those against Imran Khan.
