LHC grants bail to Aleem Khan

Ag NNI

LAHORE: The Lahore High Court on Wednesday granted post-arrest bail to former Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf provincial minister Abdul Aleem Khan in an assets beyond means case registered by the National Accountability Bureau.

Announcing the verdict, the court ordered him to deposit a surety of Rs 1 million. As the hearing resumed, a NAB prosecutor, following court’s previous order, furnished statements of prosecution witnesses and pleaded that “the accused’s sources of income are disproportionate to his expenses”, adding that the accused showed less value of his properties as they were disproportionate to his known sources of income. He said foreign remittances of Rs 89.4 million were transferred in the bank account of the accused.

He said the accused had been failed to justify the money he received from abroad and assets worth Rs 900 million. He said the record has been sought from different countries regarding the properties of the accused.

The National Accountability Bureau (NAB) had taken the former Punjab senior minister into custody on February 7, after he reportedly failed to satisfy the bureau’s officials about sources of his income in connection with his offshore companies. Speaking to the media afterbeing granted bail, Aleem Khan urged the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) to first thoroughly carry out investigations into cases and then arrest people if they are found guilty. He slammed the bureau’s practice of putting people behind the bars before completion of investigations. He said he would have quit politics had he been involved in corruption of a single penny. “If someone metes out injustice to me, Almighty Allah will do justice,” he said, adding that there are certain flaws in the NAB law which needed to be removed. Putting someone in jail until investigation is completed is a grave injustice.

He appealed to the government to look into the NAB law and questioned why the corruption watchdog failed to gather evidence against him over the past 17 months. Aleem said if the bureau could not make out a case against him, why he was kept in prison for 100 days.