ISLAMABAD, July 23: People’s Party Parliamentarians (PPP) chief whip in the National Assembly Syed Khursheed Shah has decided to cut short his London visit after receiving notices from National Accountability Bureau (NAB) in connection with a reference against him for allegedly having assets beyond his known sources of income.

Mr Shah, the PPP MNA from Sukkur, was in London in connection with the party meetings for the award of tickets for the forthcoming elections when his family members informed him about the summons requiring him to appear before NAB on Wednesday with his bank statements and other documents in support of his assets. Sources told Dawn that the MNA would return home on Tuesday abandoning the party meetings which were expected to continue till July 30.

Meanwhile, PPP spokesman and former senator Farhatullah Khan Babar on Monday condemned the fresh NAB notices to Mr Shah to, what he said, put pressure on political parties and leaders just when elections were round the corner.

In a statement, Mr Babar said the abrupt summons showed that the regime had once again singled out the PPP for victimisation before elections. He said it was significant that the NAB move had come hard on the heels of an interview by PPP chairperson Benazir Bhutto to the Sunday Times of London in which she had said that with the restoration of the chief justice, Gen Musharraf had lost all moral authority and any deal with him would be unpopular and damaging to the political party.

Moreover, he said, at a time when the parliamentary board of the party was meeting in London to decide the award of tickets for elections, the summoning of a senior leader and member of the board only showed how much NAB was interfering in the electoral process.

He said the PPP believed that elections couldn’t be fair and free unless the regime stopped using its coercive arms to manipulate the polls process. He said it was a sign of the weakness of the regime in the wake of reinstatement of the CJ that it had resorted to vendetta to browbeat opposition political leaders. “NAB is mistaken if it thinks that the PPP can be browbeaten by such underhand tactics.”