ISLAMABAD: In a new twist to the ongoing war of allegations between the treasury and the opposition, the federal government has blamed the Sharif family for purchasing the Avenfield flats with money laundered out of the Islamabad-Lahore motorway.
“[The] timing of the purchase of Avenfield flats is almost the same of construction of the motorway. The Sharif family was purchasing the Avenfield flats in the UK on the same time when the most expensive agreement of the region for construction of a motorway was being signed in the country by the then Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz government,” claimed Minister for Information Fawad Chaudhry while addressing a news conference.
Speaking alongside Minister for Communications Murad Saeed, Fawad Chaudhry blamed the Sharif family for committing massive corruption in the M-1 project.
“The then PML-N government did massive corruption under the cover of such expensive contracts for constructing the motorway. They did not spend a single penny of the looted money on the masses, rather Sharifs purchased luxury Avenfield flats from laundered money in London,” said the minister, adding that the money spent on such expensive projects by the PML-N government was borrowed from different international financial institutions.
As a result, the minister said, the country had to pay $2 billion in interest to a company that was in agreement with the then government to construct the motorway.
Fawad Chaudhry also mentioned a story published in a leading national daily on December 4, 2002, claiming that the cost of the Lahore-Islamabad motorway had exceeded to Rs. 60 billion.
“The total income of motorway till 2002 was Rs450 million only,” he said and added that Prime Minister Imran Khan was never against the development of road infrastructure, but the corruption which was committed in the name of such projects.
“There is no concept of development without road infrastructure because communication [linkages] are everything. But if you start building roads to promote your own business as it was in the case of the Sharif family then there would be no development in the country,” he said, adding, “The motorways are remarkable and must be built.”
He reiterated PM Imran Khan’s stance about corruption and said corrupt practices at the local level did not cause major damage to the country, rather it was the ‘systematic’ corruption of a prime minister and his cabinet members which ruined the nation.
Fawad said the same did happen in Pakistan where from 1947 to 2008, the total debt stood at Rs6 trillion, but it were both the Sharif and Zardari families which took it to Rs27 trillion in only 10 years.
The incumbent government had to return $10 billion in the last three years to repay the loans taken by the past governments, he added.
The minister said the country still had to repay a massive amount of debt which was piled up due to the corruption of those two families in all the economic sectors of the country.
The two families laundered the money which they had looted from the national exchequer; he said citing the example of Shehbaz Sharif who used bank accounts of his lower staff to stash Rs25 billion dirty money abroad.
The present government under the leadership of Prime Minister Imran Khan was striving hard to root out such mafias that had been weakening the country.
About the corruption cases of the Sharif family, he said the government was pursuing them vigorously to take them to the logical conclusion.
He came down hard over Shehbaz Sharif for criticizing the government on inflation and said it was him and his family who were the reason behind all the economic woes in the country.
The minister said when the country borrowed money for debt retirement, it eventually resulted in inflation, a weak economy, expensive rates of utilities like electricity and gas.
Responding to a query, Fawad said contracts worth Rs one trillion for road projects were made during different tenures of the PML-N government.
