Pervaiz Ashraf acquitted in rental power plant reference

ISLAMABAD: An accountability court acquitted former prime minister Raja Pervaiz Ashraf in the long-running rental power plant reference on Thursday.

AC-I Judge Mohammad Bashir announced the judgment which was reserved in the last hearing after concluding arguments from both sides. The court announced that it had accepted the former prime minister’s plea for acquittal in the case. The court stated that the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) could not prove any corruption charges against the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) leader.

Other people named in the case, including Shaukat Tareen, former Pesco managing director Basharat Cheema and Shahid Rafique had also been acquitted in the same case.

A reference against Ashraf was filed in December 2019 after Rana Amjad, the manager of the Sahiwal-Multan project, turned approver in the case. Ashraf was accused of misusing authority during his tenure as the minister for water and power to obtain approval from the Economic Coordination Committee and the PPP federal cabinet for an increase in the down payment to rental power companies from 7 per cent to 14 per cent, amounting to about Rs22 billion. The former premier has maintained throughout that he did not cause any loss to the national exchequer and had not indulged in any corruption.

The Karkey Karadeniz Elektrik Uretin (KKEU) was one of 12 rental power companies that had been awarded contracts by the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) government in 2008-09 to resolve the power crisis.

Under the agreement, a rental power project was installed in Karachi to supply 231 MW of electricity. However the rental project failed given the fact the electricity turned out to be costly to the country as the government had to pay a large amount of money per month to the Turkish company.

On an application filed at the Supreme Court by the then Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q) leader Faisal Saleh Hayat and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leader Khawaja Asif, the court held the contract with the Turk company as null and void.

The contract was guaranteed by the government of Pakistan which stirred the Turk company to move the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) over breach of the agreement. Pakistan lost the case in 2017 and was fined. The case was amicably resolved later. Due to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s intervention, the fine imposed on Pakistan was waived.