LAHORE, April 2: The Pakistan People's Party alleges Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif has refused to release development funds for the projects initiated by the party legislators in the province.

“The chief minister is not interested in releasing the funds to our MPAs, thus we will not allow the Punjab Assembly to function,” Opposition Leader Raja Riaz told Dawn on Saturday.

He said the PPP had given time to the PML-N government till the return of Shahbaz Sharif from London, but the chief minister did not bother to address the issue.

“Now we will press the Punjab government in and outside the Punjab Assembly for our just demand,” he said.

Riaz said the PML-N MNAs were getting funds from the federal government. “The federal government will not do what the Punjab government is doing to the opposition members,” he added.

Earlier, some of the PPP MPAs had asked the federal government to give a “tit-for-tat response” to the Punjab government on the issue of freezing their development funds.

The PPP MPAs believe that Shahbaz Sharif had diverted their grants to the dissidents of the PML-Q in order to reward them for changing their loyalties.

The MPAs say the provincial government was already showing reluctance in releasing this year's grants to them but once it made up its mind to part ways with the PPP, the government immediately stopped funding of the ongoing projects in their constituencies.

Raja Riaz said the chief minister had directed the district coordinator officers (DCOs) in the province to ensure that no grant was released for the ongoing projects initiated by the PPP legislators.

The PPP MPAs are now looking up to the prime minister's Rs20 million annual grant to continue these development projects.