LAHORE: An accountability court in Lahore on Saturday adjourned the hearing of a money laundering case registered against Shehbaz Sharif and his son, Hamza Shehbaz, until Monday on account of a public holiday in the Punjab capital on the occasion of the death anniversary, or Urs, of Ali Hujwiri.
During the previous hearing, both the prime minister and his son moved acquittal pleas in the Special Court (Central-I) who then sought a response from the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) on them.
In their petitions, the father-son duo argued the agency nominated them in the challan without first looking at the facts. “The truth is that no evidence has been found against us during the investigation carried out so far,” they claimed, requesting the court to exonerate them from the charges.
Meanwhile, the court also adjourned until Monday the hearing of the petition moved by Suleman Shehbaz, Shehbaz’s brother, for unfreezing his companies’ bank accounts.
Sharif and his family are facing charges of money laundering of billions of rupees using accounts operated in the name of their businesses and employees, according to the agency.
The agency has nominated Sharif and his sons as the principal accused in the case. 14 others have been named in the first information report (FIR) under sections 5(2) and 5(3) (criminal misconduct) of the Prevention of Corruption Act, read with 3-4 of the Anti-Money Laundering Act.
While Shehbaz is no longer chief minister of Punjab, his father is expected to request parliamentary immunity from prosecution as he did in the hearings held after he assumed the office of the prime minister following a contentious no-confidence vote against his predecessor, Imran Khan, in April.
The two have already been granted pre-arrest bail in the case. Suleman was declared proclaimed offender by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) in 2019 after he refused to appear before the dirty money watchdog despite repeated summons.
THE CASE
The reference mainly accuses Sharif of being a beneficiary of assets held in the name of his family members and frontmen, who had no sources to acquire such assets.
It said the members and frontmen of the Shehbaz family received fake foreign remittances of billions in their personal bank accounts. In addition to these remittances, the bureau said, billions of rupees were laundered by way of foreign pay orders, which were deposited in the personal bank accounts of Sharif’s two sons.
The reference further said that the family of Shehbaz failed to justify the sources of funds used for the acquisition of assets.
It said the suspects committed offences of corruption and corrupt practices as envisaged under the provisions of the National Accountability Ordinance, 1999, and money laundering as delineated in the Anti-Money Laundering Act, 2010. It asked the trial court to try the suspects and punish them under the law.
