Court summons Durrani for trial in Rs1.6bn corruption case

An accountability court on Tuesday summoned Sindh Assembly Speaker Agha Siraj Durrani and 10 other accused over their absence in a Rs1.6 billion graft reference.

The Pakistan Peoples Party leader has been facing a trial, along with his family members, friends and servants, for procuring assets beyond his known sources of income allegedly through corruption.

At the outset of the hearing in the Accountability Court-III, the attorneys representing Durrani, Zulfiqar Dahar, Shakeel Soomro, Gulbahar Baloch, Ghulam Murtaza, Mitha Khan, Muhammad Irfan, Tufail Shah, Munawar Ali, Syed Muhammad Shah and Shamshad Khatoon moved applications seeking condonation over the absence of their clients.

They said the Sindh High Court on October 13 had revoked the bail of their clients, following which they had approached the Supreme Court seeking revision of the decision, so they should be allowed exemption from the hearing for a day.

The judge, however, issued notices to all the accused through the National Accountability Bureau’s (NAB) investigating officer, directing him to ensure the presence of the accused in the courtroom in the next hearing.

Durrani’s wife Naheed, and daughters Sara, Sonya and Shahana have already been exempted by the court from personal appearance, while the case against his fourth daughter Sanam, who was allegedly absconding in the case, has been bifurcated.

According to NAB, Durrani could not account for a difference of over Rs1.6 billion between his declared total income from 1985 to 2018 and the assets, including properties, vehicles and others valuables, in his name and in the name of his family, dependants and benamidars that surfaced during the investigation.

Along with the reference, the anti-graft watchdog attached a list of 27 declared and undeclared assets, including properties, investments and vehicles, in Durrani’s and his family’s name, saying that they valued at Rs479.4 million, but the accused showed them to be worth Rs151.6 million.

Moreover, NAB showed Durrani as the beneficiary of seven benami properties — six in DHA and one in Malir — worth over Rs1 billion that were allegedly purchased in his servants’ names. The watchdog said that six of these properties were sold to different people while one was still in his possession.

Less than two weeks ago, the Sindh High Court had dismissed Durrani’s interim pre-arrest bail in NAB’s investigation into allegations of embezzlement of funds in the MPA Hostel project in Karachi, as his counsel withdrew the petition. The counsel had submitted that he did not want to press the petition for the time being with the permission of the court to file a fresh one in the same inquiry as and when required.