Pakistan\u2019s ousted premier Nawaz Sharif and his embattled family on Friday heaved a sigh of relief when the Supreme Court refused to reopen another corruption case against them.<\/p>\n
The three-member bench of Justice Mushir Alam, Justice Qazi Faez Isa and Justice Mazhar Alam Khan Miankhel rejected an appeal by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) against a 2014 decision of the Lahore High Court that quashed the case for lack of evidence.<\/p>\n
The NAB had recently filed the appeal to reopen the Rs 1.2 billion Hudaibya Paper Mills case, involving money laundering charges against the Sharif family.<\/p>\n
The case was launched in 2000 by former dictator Pervez Musharraf.<\/p>\n
The apex court bench – seeking new evidence – had asked the NAB not to \u201cparrot\u201d the Panama Papers judgement and rather articulate its own reasons to convince the bench why the reference originally filed against the Sharifs in the year 2000 should be resurrected.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have to satisfy the court on the reasons for the delay in filing the appeal,\u201d Justice Alam had told NAB\u2019s lawyer as the hearing began.<\/p>\n
The lawyer had told the court that there are holes in the high court\u2019s decision and the appeal must be reopened for the sake of justice.<\/p>\n
But the NAB failed to convince the court why it took so long to challenge the high court verdict. The court after several days of hearing the case issued a short order and rejected the NAB\u2019s appeal to reopen the case.<\/p>\n
Today\u2019s decision is major relief for the Sharif family as it was feared that after his disqualification, his younger brother Shehbaz Sharif, who is the chief minister of Punjab province, could also face the similar fate if the case was reopened.<\/p>\n
The case was based on a confessional statement of Sharif\u2019s confidante and current Finance Minister Ishaq Dar who on April 25, 2000 admitted playing role in laundering money to the tune of USD 14.86 million on behalf of the Sharifs through fictitious accounts.<\/p>\n
According to the NAB documents, Sharif, his daughter Maryam Nawaz, his father Mian Muhammad Sharif, brothers Shehbaz and Abbas Sharif, Abbas\u2019s wife Sabiha, Sharif\u2019s son Hussain and Shahbaz\u2019s son Hamza had been accused of receiving the alleged \u201cill-gotten money\u201d in the case.<\/p>\n
Dar later said that he was forced to record the statement while he was in custody after Sharif\u2019s government was sent packing by former military ruler Musharraf.<\/p>\n
Sharif, 67, and some of his family members, including his two sons and a daughter are already facing corruption charges in the Panama Papers case relating to their ownership of posh properties in London.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pakistan\u2019s ousted premier Nawaz Sharif and his embattled family on Friday heaved a sigh of relief when the Supreme Court refused to reopen another corruption case against them. The three-member bench of Justice Mushir Alam, Justice Qazi Faez Isa and Justice Mazhar Alam Khan Miankhel rejected an appeal by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) against […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13881,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13880"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13880\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13882,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13880\/revisions\/13882"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}