PTI foreign funding case: Babar challenges scrutiny process of ECP body

ISLAMABAD: In a new turn to the scrutiny process of the PTI foreign funding accounts, the Election Commission of Pakistan’s (ECP) Scrutiny Committee referred the statement of the petitioner to the Election Commission for appropriate order, who had cast serious aspersions on the scrutiny process.

The committee was constituted in March 2018 by the ECP for scrutiny of PTI accounts. However, the petitioner Akbar S Babar has casted serious aspersions on the credibility of the scrutiny process. The committee has also referred to the ECP the matter of its refusal to share PTI financial documents with the petitioner.

The statement on the scrutiny process was filed during Thursday’s Scrutiny Committee meeting, after it once again refused to share the PTI records with the petitioner, including the 23 PTI bank statements revealed on the instructions of the State Bank of Pakistan.

The scrutiny process has been going on for months and months and to be precise, the committee has met for well over 50 times during more than a couple of years yet even today its deliberations remain inconclusive.

It was learnt that in the statement, Babar states that the two-year inconclusive scrutiny must be the longest financial scrutiny ever of any entity for reasons best left to posterity. He adds that without addressing the concerns, the scrutiny of PTI foreign funding would remain devoid of credibility and fall far short of meeting the minimum standards of transparency and accuracy.

The petitioner’s lawyer Syed Ahmad Hassan Shah Thursday challenged the decision of the committee of not sharing the PTI financial records and termed it against the ECP verdicts on record and basic norms of transparency. He has challenged the transparency of the scrutiny process and claimed that without sharing the complete financial records of PTI, the petitioner is at a loss to assist the Committee in any meaningful to reach credible conclusions.

Babar levels the serious accusation that an auditor was replaced under PTI pressure ostensibly to influence the scrutiny process by stating that in January 2019, PTI made serious allegations against one of the two auditors of the Scrutiny Committee, namely Muhammad Faheem, who was subsequently replaced.