Pakistani Minister Ishaq Dar Appears before Accountability Court in Panama Scandal
TEHRAN (Tasnim) - Pakistan’s embattled Finance Minister and ousted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s close aide Ishaq Dar Monday appeared before an anti-corruption court here for the seventh time in his trial in a graft case in the Panama Papers scandal.
At Monday’s hearing, the anti-corruption watchdog National Accountability Bureau (NAB) prosecution presented two new witnesses against the minister, Dawn reported.
The NAB on September 8 filed the case against 67-year-old Dar following the July 28 verdict of the Supreme Court in the Panama Papers case that indicted Sharif and his family. The apex court had also disqualified Sharif and ordered corruption cases against him, his children Maryam, Husain and Hasan and son-in-law Muhammad Safdar.
The first witness, Abdul Rehman Gondal, branch manager of a private bank’s parliament branch, has completed his statement and is being cross-examined by Dar’s counsel Khawaja Haris, the report said.
Gondal provided details of the account held by Dar in the bank. He informed the court that NAB had summoned him along with relevant documents on August 16 and he submitted the requisite record concerning Dar to NAB’s investigating officer, it said.
Gondal said he had provided bank statements of Dar ranging from March 25, 2005 to August 16, 2017 to NAB. The bank transaction details provided by the witness were made part of case record by the court, the report said. The second witness, Masood Ghani, the operations manager in a private bank, will give his testimony later in the day.
The court had on Wednesday adjourned the hearing of the graft cases till October 23 after the minister’s senior counsel left the country in a rush. In the preceding hearing of the case, Haris had cross-questioned Al-Baraka Islamic Bank’s Assistant Vice President Tariq Javed — the prosecution’s third witness.
The court had indicted Dar last month in a NAB case pertaining to his owning assets “beyond his known sources of income”. On October 19, the anti-graft court had indicted Sharif, his daughter and son-in-law in a corruption case related to the Avenfield properties in London.
The case was one of the three cases registered by the NAB on September 8 against 67-year-old Sharif, his children and son-in-law in the Accountability Court in Islamabad.
