ISLAMABAD: State Minister for Information Marriyum Aurangzeb on Thursday said the JIT report had failed to find any corroborative evidence in regard to the allegations of money laundering, tax evasion and corruption levelled by the petitioners against the prime minister (PM).
By presenting himself and his family for accountability the PM had established a historic precedent, notwithstanding the fact that he enjoyed constitutional immunity and his sons, being non-resident Pakistanis doing business in foreign countries, were also not under any legal obligation to participate in a probe regarding their private business, she said speaking in a current affairs programme of a private TV channel.
To a question, she said the PM offered himself for accountability to uphold the sanctity of law and the constitution and now in the future nobody would be able to escape accountability. The controversy surrounding the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) had been amply established by its own report, she added.
The PML-N, she said, had reservations about the JIT right from the beginning and those were also brought into the notice of the Supreme Court and which were still intact.
Marriyum said that the contents of the report were not an indictment against the Prime Minister as the entire report talked in terms of probabilities rather than definite conclusions or solid proofs. She said that the case still had to be decided by the judges; therefore it would be wrong to draw any inferences from the JIT report.
The minister said that the JIT in spite of its best efforts could not find even a single instance of corruption, or kickbacks pertaining to the three tenures of Nawaz Sharif as Prime Minister, two terms as Chief Minister of Punjab and one stint as Finance Minister of the province.
She categorically said that the Prime Minister was not linked to the Panama Papers case in any way and the JIT report had also failed to find any concrete evidence to that effect.
She said that according to all the surveys including Gallup, the PML-N was the largest and the most popular party of the country.
Published in Daily Times, July 28th , 2017.
