ISLAMABAD: The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) on Wednesday grilled Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) over the “strange” donor names while hearing the foreign funding case against the party.
During the ECP’s hearing of the PTI’s prohibited foreign funding case, chaired by the election commissioner of Pakistan, the members of the commission grilled PTI’s financial expert Najam Shah over resurfacing of strange names who have donated money to the party’s accounts.
However, Shah responded that Pakistanis when settled abroad usually change their names, adding that many Pakistanis whose real names are something else back at home while abroad are known by some other names.
On this, the commission questioned the PTI representative as to why the national identity card numbers are not mentioned against the names of the donors when the ECP had made it mandatory to mention the CNIC numbers and the phone numbers of the donors.
To another query by the commission to whether any foreign national can also deposit donations directly to a political party’s bank account, the PTI representative said that the PTI had no foreign bank account and in the foreign countries the donations were deposited in the party’s accounts through agents.
The commission, however, adjourned the hearing for Tuesday next week.
Later talking to reporters outside the ECP, PTI central secretary for information Farrukh Habib demanded that the security committee report regarding Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and Pakistan People’s Party’s (PPP) foreign funding should be submitted before the ECP without any further delay.
He said that they had been waiting for the submission of the report for the last one month but both the parties resorted to delaying tactics, which was against the law.
He said that the PTI foreign funding case was being heard on a daily basis but the PPP and the PML-N adopted various strategies to hide their party accounts, demanding that the ECP should bring the scrutiny committee report of both the parties to the fore and initiated hearing of their case on a daily basis.
Habib said that there were clear orders of the court that cases of all the parties should be heard indiscriminately and fairly.
Talking about the problems currently facing the country, he said that everything was moving quite smoothly and the economy was doing well as all the economic indicators spoke volume about it, which was even admitted by the new governor State Bank of Pakistan.
He stated that the PTI government under Imran Khan’s visionary leadership started various public welfare initiatives to provide maximum relief to the rank and file.
However, he said that an external conspiracy was hatched and ousted the elected government to impose the government of “Shehbaz Speed”, who made the life of commoners “a hell” during his 60 days of rule through back-breaking inflation and prolonged load shedding.
Habib said that there was zero load shedding and prices were under control but now after the imposition of the “imported” government, there were unprecedented power outages and an unbridled price hike.
He said that Shehbaz did five foreign visits but of no good but he was more interested to remove his name from the ECL.
He said that the “imported government” changed the FIA investigative prosecutors and amended the NAB law under a well-planned strategy to eliminate corruption cases against Shehbaz and his family.
“Shehbaz Sharif is heading the country towards bankruptcy and severe crisis; therefore, transparent polls should be held at the earliest to pull the country out of the prevailing crisis,” he demanded.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022