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LAHORE: An accountability court on Tuesday indicted former prime minister Raja Pervaiz Ashraf and eight others in a National Accountability Bureau (NAB) reference on the charge of making illegal appointments in the Gujranwala Electric Power Company (Gepco).
According to the NAB reference, Mr Ashraf, as minister for water and power, wrote a letter to the managing director (MD) of Pakistan Electric Power Company (Pepco), Tahir Basharat Cheema, to waive the condition of written test and recruit as many as 437 people without taking merit into consideration.
The accountability court heard the case filed by NAB in 2016.
The other eight people indicted in the case were Muhammad Ibrahim, Hashmat Ali Kazmi, former MD of Pepco Tahir Basharat Cheema, Malik Muhammad, Razi Abbas, Saleem Arif, Wazir Ali and Shahid Rafi.
The court has summoned first four witnesses of prosecution to record their statements on the next hearing of the case on Oct 10.
Talking to newsmen, Mr Ashraf’s counsel, Iftikhar Shahid, said that the NAB prosecutor was not providing copies of the reference to the legal team of Mr Ashraf, but on the order of the court these copies were provided to them on Tuesday.
He, however, said that these copies were not visible and readable.
“We informed the court about the deficiency in readability of the reference copies but did not raise any objections because we wanted to move forward.”
Defending Mr Ashraf, Mr Shahid claimed that his client never wrote any letter or gave orders to anyone for providing jobs to the people.
He claimed that apparently the NAB case against his client was frivolous and baseless.
“Pepco had recruited 437 people on their own because it was an autonomous body,” the defence counsel said, adding that jobs of all the recruited people had been terminated and no loss was caused to the national exchequer.
Talking to the media, Mr Ashraf rejected all charges filed by NAB against him and said that although charges had been framed against him under the court procedure, he was still trying to understand the charges.
He said that it was the double standard of NAB authorities that he had to appear before the court for his alleged involvement in a job recruitment case, but another former prime minister named in the Panama Papers case was sitting in London and was not appearing in courts.
“Every PPP leader, including founding chairman Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir Bhutto and Asif Ali Zardari appeared before courts”.
The PPP leader said that courts had hanged Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and acquitted Mr Zardari of all charges and cases, but who would compensate for Mr Zardari’s 12 years which he had spent in the jail.
He also criticised NAB for “showing discrimination” in dealing with cases of PPP leaders and other political parties.
He said that names of PPP leaders facing charges and cases had been placed on the Exit Control List (ECL), but former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and his family members had been allowed to move freely.
NA-120 by-election
In reply to a question about PPP’s poor performance in NA-120, he said that it was a by-election and all parties had expressed reservations over the electoral process.
He claimed that more than 10,000 jobs had been given to voters to ensure that they vote for the PML-N candidate in the by-election.
Along with the Gepco scam, Mr Ashraf has been indicted by an accountability court of Islamabad in the rental power case.
The former prime minister is also accused of misusing his authority during his tenure as minister to get approval from the Economic Coordination Committee for an increase in the down payment to the rental power companies from 7 per cent to 14 per cent, amounting to about Rs22 billion.
Published in Dawn, September 20th, 2017
