WHEN high-stakes political interests are involved, then a multimillion pound secret is unlikely to remain under wraps for long. So it has proved in the case of the £190m settlement that the UK-based National Crime Agency arrived at in December 2019 with property tycoon and owner of Bahria Town Ltd Malik Riaz, details of which were contained in a non-disclosure agreement (NDA).

At a presser on Tuesday, Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah spilled the beans on the NDA. Further, he accused former prime minister Imran Khan and his wife Bushra Bibi of accepting Rs5bn and huge tracts of land from Bahria to “provide protection” to the real estate firm in the money laundering case.

As a result of efforts by Shahzad Akbar, the then PM’s aide on accountability and allegedly tasked by Mr Khan to resolve the matter, the NDA that was arrived at in the UK provided for the humongous amount to be adjusted against Mr Riaz’s civil liability in Pakistan. (The latter refers to Bahria’s offer of Rs460bn, accepted by the Supreme Court in March 2019, to settle the case pertaining to the firm’s illegal acquisition of land in Karachi.)

According to the interior minister, a parallel agreement was also executed closer to home whereby land measuring 458 kanals with an official value of Rs530m was transferred to a trust owned by the ousted premier and his spouse. Another 240 kanals was, he said, transferred to Farah Shehzadi, reportedly a friend of Bushra Bibi. The federal cabinet has formed a sub-committee to investigate the matter and deal with it according to the law.

Read: Malik Riaz’s family regrets release of ‘confidential’ deal

The allegations made in the press conference are extremely serious and must of course be probed. The saga of the NCA’s settlement with Mr Riaz — specifically how the Pakistani state was seen to go out of its way to ensure a favourable outcome for the well-connected property tycoon — is a sordid one, even without taking the recent ‘revelations’ into account.

It is mind-boggling how even fundamental requirements of justice were flouted in the process of favouring an individual. Consider that the NDA, brokered by the state, allowed members of his family holding UK bank accounts that had been frozen for containing the suspected ‘proceeds of crime’, to pay the contents of those accounts “at [their] sole discretion” towards Bahria’s existing civil debt. Can one even expect that beyond political vendetta against the ousted prime minister, the present government will seek to right this injustice?

Published in Dawn, June 19th, 2022