News Desk |
Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) co-Chairman Asif Ali Zardari on Saturday, March 16, 2019, has challenged the banking court’s decision of 15th March to transfer the National Accountability Bureau’s fake accounts case against him to an accountability court in Rawalpindi. The petition was filed in the Sindh High Court.
The National Accountability Bureau Rawalpindi, on Friday 15th March, summoned the former president and his son PPP Chairperson Bilawal Bhutto Zardari on March 20th in the fake accounts case against the Zardari siblings and Bilawal.
NAB Rawalpindi has sent out summons to the two PPP leaders. The notice ordered them, father and son, to appear in NAB Rawalpindi’s Islamabad office on 20th March. The PPP spearheads are to present themselves before the JIT team investigating the case. Sources say Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah will be summoned next.
In December 2015, the Federal Investigation Agency had begun a discreet investigation into certain bank accounts through which multi-billion rupee transactions had been made.
A banking court in Karachi transferred the money laundering/fake accounts case against former president Asif Ali Zardari, his sister Faryal Talpur and other accomplices to Rawalpindi NAB, granting an earlier request by the Accountability watchdog, GVS earlier reported.
Following the verdict, the court also dismissed the interim pre-arrest bail granted to the former president, his sister and other suspects in the case. The banking court had reserved its decision earlier this month after NAB had pleaded to the court to transfer the case to an accountability court.
Read more: Zardari’s woes: Case transferred to Pindi, bail cancelled
In December 2015, the Federal Investigation Agency had begun a discreet investigation into certain bank accounts through which multi-billion rupee transactions had been made. According to FIA sources, information regarding the fake accounts came to the fore when an intelligence agency picked up a prominent money changer in an unrelated case, GVS earlier reported.
In November 2018, the government of Pakistan’s accountability front had identified more than 5,000 fake accounts, which were allegedly used for money laundering.
As the monitoring and investigation of these suspicious accounts continued, it surfaced that five of these accounts in two banks, the Sindh Bank and Summit Bank, had been used for transactions worth around Rs15 billion. The accounts were operated by fake companies. Further probe revealed that the money was transferred to companies own by Omni Group. The chairperson of the company Anwar Majeed is a close aide of Zardari.
Read more: NAB analyzes headway in fake accounts investigation
Anwar Majeed and his son Abdul Ghani Majeed were arrested in August last year and are currently on judicial remand.