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ISLAMABAD: Leader of the Opposition in the National Assembly Syed Khursheed Shah has asked Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to present before parliament the record of the assets he mentioned in his speech in the lower house on May 16 last year.
Mr Shah has written a letter to NA Speaker Sardar Ayaz Sadiq, seeking the record of the prime minister’s assets and saying that it should be presented before the assembly.
The letter said that the prime minister, in his speech in the National Assembly, had claimed that the entire record of the Gulf Steel Mills and other documents related to his assets were available with him. But he had never presented the documents before parliament, it added.
“The documents shown by the media on Wednesday night were not new as they have already been presented before the Joint Investigation Team in the Panama Papers case,” the opposition leader said.
Says the Sharifs are employing delaying tactics in Panama Papers case proceedings
He said that the rulers were adopting delaying tactics as they had nothing to say before the Supreme Court.
He said that tampering of official documents by Security Exchange Commission of Pakistan Chairman Zafar Hijazi had been proved by the Federal Investigation Agency and National Accountability Bureau. “But the person who ordered Mr Hijazi to tamper with the record has not been taken to task so far.”
Despite having such concessions, the rulers “are crying” and, instead of giving answers to the Supreme Court, they are “threatening” it, he said.
PPP leader Sherry Rehman linked the new documents filed by the Sharif family in the court to the recent arrival of a top Qatari official in Pakistan with a delegation of his country that “rushed to the country to save Nawaz Sharif”.
Talking to journalists outside the Supreme Court, she said: “These were old documents and a part of delaying tactics being employed by the Sharifs.”
She said that the prime minister did not even mention anything about the ongoing Indian aggression along the Line of Control and the Working Boundary during his recent visit to Sialkot.
“Amid echoes of unprovoked Indian firing, the premier indulged in politics,” she said.
Another PPP leader, Qamar Zaman Kaira, said that the ruling party had been trying to twist facts since the beginning of the Panama Papers case. “Now they have brought another letter to the fore but it seems that the court will dismiss the letter like the previous ones.”
He said that the Supreme Court observed on Thursday that the prime minister and his family had failed to submit supporting documents which could substantiate their claims about their offshore assets.
Chaudhry Manzoor, yet another PPP leader, said that now the Sharif family would face a money laundering case in the United Kingdom also as the British government had recently passed a money laundering law.
Published in Dawn, July 21st, 2017
