ISLAMABAD Sept 11: PPP vice-chairman and party’s parliamentary leader Makhdoom Amin Fahim asserted on Thursday that PPP did not believe in striking clandestine deals.

Mr Fahim, who kept himself away from parliamentary proceedings since the start of the current session, told Dawn that he was out of town for sometime and will be attending Friday’s proceedings.

He quashed speculation that he was busy in behind-the-scene parleys with the power brokers. He however added enigmatically that “everyone has a right to hold his own opinion.”

A party source said the Makhdoom was relaxing in Murree during the last couple of weeks and had now been asked by the party to return to the house to kill off rumours that he was keeping away to avoid the physical torture of shouting and desk thumping.

A senior PPP leader and media manager of Benazir Bhutto, senator Farhatullah Babar said the ARD component parties were eagerly awaiting the outcome of the MMA-government talks.

He confirmed that moves were afoot to entice away some more PPP legislators to the PPP Patriots group but said these efforts were doomed to fail.

A highly-placed source in the PPP told Dawn on Thursday that the party MPs were under tremendous pressure from the administration for the last couple of weeks to break away from the party. Some of them were said to have been offered attractive perks while others were allegedly threatened with the NAB files.

Deputy parliamentary leader of MMA Hafiz Hussain Ahmed, when contacted for his comment about the constitutional crisis, said the MMA supreme council will hold its crucial meeting within a couple of days as its president Maulana Shah Ahmed Noorani was due to arrive here from visit abroad on Thursday night.

He said Sheikh Rashid’s latest statement that the presidential referendum was legal and that the LFO was part of the Constitution was a deliberate attempt at sabotaging the successful talks held in Lahore between the S.M. Zafar-led team and the MMA.

The MMA and the ARD would try to narrow down their differences on the method of protest on the floor of the house when the National Assembly resumes its proceedings after a two-day recess on Friday.

The ARD parliamentary leader Makhdoom Javed Hashmi told Dawn on Thursday: “The entire opposition, including the MMA, supported continued protest without preventing the treasury from doing legislative business if at all it was interested in conducting some worthwhile business.”

He, however, said the opposition was clear on one point that it will never allow Gen Musharraf to address the joint session of parliament since he was not a constitutionally-elected president.

ARD: The Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy (ARD) is likely to stage a sit-in in front of the Speaker’s chair or outside the National Assembly in the next phase of its protest, tentatively scheduled to start from Sept 20.

The protest is expected to be further intensified after Oct 10, the day elections were held last year.