ISLAMABAD, Sept 29: The Allied Bank said on Monday it was following like other financial institutions a controversial 1984 decree of then military ruler General Ziaul Haq that equated two women to one man as witnesses, while clarifying a report that the bank had refused to accept women witnesses.

A report in Monday’s Dawn had quoted a senior bank official in Islamabad as saying in a memo to a branch that “ladies are not acceptable” as witnesses, as one of the pre-condition for the grant of a credit facility without specifying any law.

But a bank press release issued on Monday quoted a bank spokesman in Karachi as saying: “Allied Bank, like all financial institutions, adheres to the Qanun-i-Shahadat Ordinance, 1984 (Order), section 17 (1) and section 17 (2), sub-sections (a) and (b), according to which two men or one man and two women can testify as witnesses in financial matters.”

This, he said, “is in line with the relevant laws and the State Bank regulations”.

But the bank did not deny its official’s note quoted in the Dawn report that said: “Witnesses of ladies are not acceptable (sic)”, which forced the applicant for the credit facility to substitute a new promissory note signed by two male witnesses for one earlier submitted with the signatures of two women, besides some other documents already signed by male witnesses.

Yet the press release quoted the bank spokesman as claiming the newspaper report “may therefore be misleading and highly defamatory to the Allied Bank’s corporate reputation”.

The Allied Bank release indicated other commercial banks in the country too were following General Zia’s gender-discriminatory decree, which appeared odd when the country’s central bank is headed by its first woman governor, Shamshad Akhtar, and one commercial bank, the First Women Bank, is wholly run by women to help women entrepreneurs.—Our Reporter