ISLAMABAD: The founding day of the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) will be celebrated with a difference this year.

While the PTI is expected to officially celebrate the day on April 25 with the usual fanfare, some dissidents, including a number of founding members, will gather at a ‘national conference’ in a hotel in Islamabad.

The conference to mark the 18th founding day of the party is being organised by PTI’s former information secretary and founding president of its Balochistan chapter, Akbar S. Babar, who parted ways with the party after developing serious differences with chairman Imran Khan on financial matters and party elections.

The conference, according to Mr Babar, is expected to be attended by a “large number” of founding office-bearers and “genuine ideological members”.

Mr Babar told this reporter that the event was being organised to honour the activists who had contributed to the building of the PTI as a national party but were sidelined by “self-seeking opportunists controlling the party”.

He declined to give names of the activists expected to attend the conference, but claimed that some present office-bearers would also be there.

Mr Babar, who believes that the party’s ‘loss of direction’ is a national tragedy, dispelled a perception that the conference was being planned for PTI bashing or mudslinging. “It is planned to take stock in a dignified and sober manner of the present PTI drift towards becoming a conventional political party,” he said.

He also alleged attempts by ‘traditionalists’ to offer perks and positions to activists showing interest in attending the conference.

Sources in the party said that Mr Babar, who had been inactive for over a year since distancing himself from the party’s leadership, was busy reviving his old contacts within the PTI.

Once considered to be a close confidant of the chairman, Mr Babar alleges that he was sidelined when he pointed out “corruption and mismanagement” and demanded the setting up of an accountability commission.

The sources said differences between Mr Babar and Mr Khan first came to the surface when the latter refused to resign from his assembly seat after the assassination of Baloch nationalist leader Akbar Bugti during the Musharraf regime in 2006.

Mr Babar claims to have proof about transfer of party funds into some personal accounts and says that he had provided them to Mr Khan who, according to him, surprisingly did not take any action.

Besides differences on financial matters, Mr Babar had also challenged the intra-party elections and met former chief election commissioner Fakhruddin G. Ebrahim to point out alleged rigging and manipulations.

Perturbed over the party leadership’s decision to open its doors for “rank opportunists”, Mr Babar also regretted that leading roles had been handed over to people who had nothing to do with the PTI’s ideology and had been switching parties for vested interests.

He said it was strange that the functional control of an ideological party had been handed over to people who had been maligning it for years.

He alleged that the party tickets for last year’s general elections had been put on sale.

A PTI spokesman said Mr Babar had nothing to do with the party affairs and could not organise an event under its banner.

Refuting the allegations of corruption and mismanagement of the party’s funds, the spokesman said that it had conducted a forensic audit of its accounts to ensure transparency. He refused to comment on the allegations regarding sale of election tickets and rigging in the party polls, and accused Mr Babar of trying to gain the media attention in an effort to come out of “political isolation”.

Despite repeated attempts, PTI’s information secretary Dr Shireen Mazari could not be contacted for official comments on the development.