Defence to cross-examine witness in Sharjeel case today

An accountability court will preside over the cross-examination of a prosecution witness by the defence on Friday (today) in the advertisement case against Pakistan Peoples Party leader and former Sindh information minister Sharjeel Inam Memon.

The court on Thursday recorded the testimony of a witness, Khalid Malik, produced by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB). After that the court ordered the defence counsel to cross-question the witness in the next hearing.

Memon and 16 others have been charged with misappropriating advertisement funds. NAB had filed a reference against them in 2016 on the grounds of alleged irregularities in the awarding of contracts to different newspapers and TV channels for running public-interest advertisements and others during Memon’s tenure as the province’s information minister.

The anti-graft watchdog accused the former minister, information department officials and some private persons of colluding to cause a loss of Rs5.76 billion to the national exchequer in the name of fake contracts and bogus expenses.

The court is hearing the matter on a daily basis and so far, according to NAB, around a dozen witnesses have been produced before the judge. The approximate number of witnesses named in the case is 50.

On Tuesday the Sindh High Court (SHC) had granted bail to Memon against a surety of Rs5 million and ordered the Ministry of Interior to place him on the exit control list. The court had also suspended the arrest warrants for him in another case, being investigated by NAB, pertaining to accumulating assets beyond his sources of income.

The SHC bench observed that the findings in the order were only a tentative assessment of the material on record and would have no bearing on the outcome of the trial, which shall be decided on merit by the trial court based on the evidence on record.

On Wednesday the SHC had granted interim protective bail to Memon in the assets case. The former minister had filed a petition in the court for obtaining pre-arrest bail in the NAB investigation against him for having accumulated wealth through corruption and corrupt practices without known sources of income.

The petitioner’s counsel Khalid Javed said NAB kept the inquiry pending as a tool to pressurise his client as well as kept him in prison for years. Javed said the NAB inquiry and the warrants of arrest against the petitioner at the stage of investigation were sheer abuse of power by the anti-graft watchdog.

He said NAB had already attempted to execute the arrest warrants against the petitioner despite the fact that he had been incarcerated for the past 21 months and was granted bail in the NAB reference by the court a day earlier.

He requested that the court grant interim protective bail to his client because the lawmaker feared that the anti-graft watchdog could arrest him once again. Without touching the merits of the case, the SHC’s division bench headed by Justice Mohammad Karim Khan Agha granted interim protective bail to the petitioner in the sum of Rs1 million, directing him to join the NAB investigation and cooperate with the investigators.