KARACHI: The Election Commission of Pakistan has imposed a fine of Rs49,000 on Karachi Mayor Murtaza Wahab for violating its code of conduct for the general elections.

District Monitoring Officer (central) Syed Hassan Abbas Jaffri took the decision after the mayor neither appeared before him nor filed any explanation in response to a notice issued to him over the violation of the code.

Mr Wahab has violated Points 18 and 41 of the code of conduct for political parties, contesting candidates, and election and polling agents for the general elections, it added.

Point 18 of the code states that the president, prime minister, ministers, chief ministers, mayors, chairmen, nazims, their deputies and several others government functionaries must not participate in the election campaign.

As per Point 41 of the code, political parties, candidates, their supporters, government/local government functionaries or elected representatives, shall not announce or inaugurate, openly or secretly, their overall development schemes or development work or do anything which tends to influence the results of an election in favour of or against a particular candidate or political party after the announcement of the election schedule till the day of polling and shall not give any subscription or donation, or make promise for giving such subscription or donation, to any institution of their respective constituency or to any other intuition as well.

He was given a notice as the ECP stated that he had clearly given an impression that even being the mayor of Karachi he was supporting a specific political party.

Published in Dawn, February 5th, 2024