LAHORE, Jan 18: The returning officer for PP-147 and his subordinate staff on Saturday refused to depose before the inquiry team of the Election Commission of Pakistan.

The commission had constituted a three-member team headed by its deputy secretary Aiyaz Baig to inquire into the embezzlement of 500 ballot boxes which had already been taken up by the Lahore District Returning Officer last week. Two commission officers were also included in the team.

Sources said on Saturday that returning officer Mehar Muhammad Nawaz and assistant returning officer Javed Iqbal told the inquiry team that they could not make any official statement unless instructed by the DRO. Both the officers argued that they had already deposed before the DRO on the matter and they were instructed not to make a statement before any other inquiry team.

However, they said that they could provide documents and other evidence to the inquiry team. The inquiry team, the sources said, told them that it was just carrying out a fact-finding exercise and their statements were to be treated as a “normal business”.

An official of the DRO office, while requesting anonymity, told Dawnthat he had defended the stance of both the returning officer and his assistant before the inquiry team and had asked it to get a formal permission from the DRO for recording their statements.

“How could they record the statements without even informing the DRO about the inquiry initiated parallel to the one already in progress?” asked the official.

He claimed that the commission had not sent any notification on the constitution of an inquiry team to the DRO and this parallel inquiry could create a rift between the two bodies probing the matter simultaneously.

It was learnt that after the refusal made by the officials concerned to furnish statements, the team inspected the election material, including blank ballot papers and rubber stamps, currently lying with the returning officer.

The bags containing both the surplus 7,000 ballot papers and other 118,000 ballots were examined randomly by the team after de-sealing them. The ballot papers invoices showing the dispatch of the ballots to the returning officer from the printing press were also checked randomly.

In the meanwhile, the DRO’s liaison officer Mian Ghulam Hussain, conducting the judicial inquiry, visited the printing press and questioned the staff there.

He was told by the deputy manger of the press that as per the normal practice, ballot papers getting printed in the press were never counted and were dispatched to the officials concerned after the gap of two to three days.