LAHORE, May 14: An Ehtesab bench of the Lahore High Court on Wednesday reserved its judgment on a petition of former MNA Rana Tanveer Hussain against his conviction on corruption charges in a NAB reference.

Rana Hussain was sentenced to five years of rigorous imprisonment and fined Rs6.8 million by an accountability court on charges of misusing his official position in acquiring assets including foreign currency certificates, an animal farm and plots worth Rs6.8 million, which were disproportionate to his known sources of income. He was also convicted on charges of making huge investments in the Muridkey Oil Refinery in 1998.

The petitioner argued that the assets were either inherited by him or gifted to him and being a member of a well-off family, he could afford to procure those assets within legal limits.

He further claimed that the Economic Reforms Act 1992 had provided legal protection to procurement of foreign currency certificates and he could not be convicted on that account. He also submitted to the court that he used to get his TA/DA in US dollars, and this amount had wrongly been mentioned as ill-gotten wealth by the NAB authorities. The conviction is therefore liable to be set aside, the petitioner pleaded.

NAB counsel Javed Shaukat Malik refuted these submissions arguing that the petitioner had neither disclosed his source of income to the investigating authorities and the trial court nor explained how he had been able to make huge investments in the refinery and acquire immovable and movable assets. He argued that as ruled by the Supreme Court in 2000, the Economic Reforms Act 1992 did not provide any cover to criminal transactions like those mentioned in the reference.

According to the NAB counsel, the petitioner had exchanged a low-value piece of land with a higher-value one, and the transaction fell within the definition of “unconscionable transaction” in the Contract Act which was subject to penalisation. There exists no documentary proof as to whether all the properties alleged to have been acquired by the petitioner illegally in abuse of his position, existed in his name prior to Jan 1, 1985, the cut-off date for the application of the NAB Ordinance 1999, as inherited properties, he added.

To a court query, Mr Shaukat submitted that the petitioner had produced oral evidence in the form of witnesses making statements before the trial court without producing any document in support of their testimony.