ISLAMABAD: The Election Com­mis­sion of Pakistan will take up on April 22 important petitions, including those seeking disqualification of Senator Yousuf Raza Gilani and challenging a decision of the ECP’s panel auditing PTI’s foreign funding to keep the party’s financial documents secret.

During the last hearing, the ECP had accepted for hearing the petition seeking Mr Gilani’s disqualification.

The ECP also decided to issue notices to the former prime minister and his son Ali Haider Gilani over the video clip in which the latter was seen telling PTI MNAs how to waste a vote in the Senate election by over-writing and ticking in front of the names of all candidates on the ballot paper and purportedly offering money and development funds.

The commission had asked the PTI to include as respondents the names of two of its lawmakers — Jamil Ahmed and Fahim Khan — who were allegedly involved in the video.

Notices issued to ex-PM, son over video clip scam

Advocate Amir Abbas, lawyer for PTI’s Alia Hamza, argued that the Supreme Court had directed that elections be held in a transparent and fair manner.

He said his case was not related to the criminal aspect of bribery since that would be dealt with separately; instead the case was related to the transparency of the election process.

He further said that an application had already been filed with the ECP before the Senate elections in this connection.

Giving arguments, Advocate Amir Abbas said that Mr Gilani’s son had acknowledged that he was in the video clip, adding that it was the ECP’s duty to stop corrupt people from entering parliament.

He wondered whether permission could be granted for corruption if the ballot papers were not identifiable.

“If someone accepts [his corruption] before the entire media, it is considered as a proof. Tribunals’ decisions do not take four years [then]. When the facts have been acknowledged, there is no need for forensics,” he said.

Alia Hamza then said that PTI’s Fauzia Arshad had received more votes than Finance Minister Hafeez Shaikh in the Senate election to which ECP’s Qureshi replied that this was the beauty of democracy and secret voting.

However, Mr Abbas said that it was this “beauty of democracy due to which briefcases full of money were moved about”.

Foreign funding case

The ECP on the same day will also hear a complaint filed last month by petitioner Akbar S. Babar in the foreign funding case against the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI), challenging a decision of the Election Commission of Pakistan’s scrutiny committee to keep the party’s financial documents secret.

In the petition, Mr Babar had assailed the scrutiny committee’s order of Feb 9 to keep the documents, including those of over a dozen undeclared bank accounts of the PTI revealed on the instructions of State Bank of Pakistan (SBP), secret.

The scrutiny committee said the documents could not be shared with the petitioner because the respondent (PTI) had objected to it.

In the complaint, the petitioner said the committee was formed to conduct scrutiny of foreign funding of the PTI in the “presence” of the petitioner/complainant and the PTI according to the committee’s terms of reference.

The order to keep material forming the part of the scrutiny process secret was unlawful and far exceeded the mandate of the scrutiny committee, which was to conduct fact-finding and not fact-hiding, he argued.

The petitioner said that without having the entire record of scrutiny, he could not properly assist the scrutiny committee in reaching a credible conclusion.

Published in Dawn, March 20th, 2021