ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan on Wednesday alleged that the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) was preparing new documents for Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif with regards to the Panama Papers case in the Supreme Court to save him from accountability.
Imran said whether Maryam Safdar was the beneficiary owner or trustee of the London flats, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leadership will have to provide evidence on this count, asking why the government was silent on foreign media’s barrage of allegations against the prime minister.
Talking to journalists outside the Supreme Court, the PTI chief said the PanamaLeaks case would be over with a decision on property belonging to Maryam Safdar. “The central question of the case is what is her link to the London properties and if she came out as owner instead of trustee, the entire case will automatically end there,” he maintained.
Imran lamented that investigative entities, including the NAB, FBR and FIA were acting like the B-team of Nawaz Sharif while the ICIJ, British and German newspapers were levelling charges against him but the government was doing nothing. He again threw up a challenge to the Sharif family that if the allegations against Maryam Safdar were false, then why those behind these were not being sued.
The government, he noted, called all these reports as fraud and if it were so, why not the British newspaper ‘The Guardian’ was sued.
The PTI chairman claimed that all the documents proved that Maryam was the real owner of the London flats, which were purchased during 1990s and this was what four ministers had also being saying and the ICIJ too. He alleged that the FBR was preparing new documents for Nawaz Sharif with regards to the Panama Papers case in the Supreme Court.
The PTI Spokesman Fawad Chaudhry also briefly talked to the media to urge the Supreme Court to allow live telecast of the proceedings, saying this was important to expose the liars. He raised the question whether or not Maryam’s signatures on documents were genuine.
Meanwhile, presiding over a key meeting of the party here, Imran said the World Economic Forum (WEF) had not allowed Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who had gone to Davos on the taxpayers’ money, to address the forum and this had caused embarrassment to the nation instead of winning goodwill.
The PTI leadership felt that the reason behind denying Nawaz to speak to the forum was that the organisers of the event were aware of his corruption and the Panama story. It claimed that the Sharif family had been trapped in a vortex of lies. The meeting noted with concern that on the behest of Nawaz Sharif, Minister for Railways Saad Rafique had already started insulting the judges, whereas in the apex court, their lawyers were shifting the matter from one to another.
Imran chaired a meeting of the PTI members of the Senate as well as the National Assembly. The forum noted that by telling a lie on the floor of the National Assembly, Nawaz Sharif had tried to undermine parliament’s integrity. He said that Nawaz Sharif was trying his level best to run away from accountability.
The meeting noted that there was the most important headway in the apex court proceedings and that the story built on the basis of lies was falling down. It emphasised that it was important that Nawaz Sharif must be held accountable before parliament, the Supreme Court and the masses, which is also important for survival and strengthening of the system.
A senior PTI leader, Andleeb Abbas, has written a letter to the Federal Obudsman about the silence adopted by the Prime Minister’s Secretariat about her written query regarding the sources of fee being paid to the prime minister’s lawyer, defending him in the Panama case in the apex court.
She maintained that as a Pakistani citizen, it was her fundamental right to have access to information and this right was enshrined also in the Right to Information Act, 2013. She noted that within 14 days, the PM Secretariat was bound to reply to her question but it did not.
