ISLAMABAD: The head of the Joint Investigation Team constituted by the Supreme Court to probe assets of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and Ishaq Dar admitted before an accountability court on Wednesday that the JIT had not verified the taxable income of the former finance minister.

During the cross-examination, advocate Qazi Misbah, the counsel for co-accused persons in Mr Dar’s assets reference, put multiple questions to Wajid Zia, star prosecution witness who headed the JIT, related to the properties and declaration of the former minister.

The lawyer asked whether the JIT had verified the assets declaration that Mr Dar had submitted to the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) in 2008. Mr Zia responded in the negative, saying that the JIT had examined only those documents that it had received from the investigation agencies.

NAB accuses ex-finance minister of amassing assets beyond his known sources of income

The counsel reminded him that NAB had earlier conducted a probe against Mr Dar in an assets reference but later exonerated him.

Mr Zia said that this fact was not in his knowledge. When the counsel pointed out that Irfan Naeem Mangi, the NAB director general who was a member of the JIT, knew about that inquiry, Mr Zia said that Mr Mangi had not shared any detail about the previous inquiry.

Mr Zia informed the court that the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) did not provide Mr Dar’s complete record to the JIT. Mr Dar stated before the JIT that in 1999 the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) had confiscated his tax record. However, the JIT did not verify this claim as well.

According to him, the FBR did not share Mr Dar’s tax record from 1981 to 1985 with the JIT.

NAB alleges that Mr Dar acquired in his name and/or in the names of his dependants assets worth Rs831.7 million, which is disproportionate to the known sources of his income.

The NAB’s reference accuses Mr Dar of amassing assets beyond his known sources of income. In the supplementary reference, NAB named the president of the National Bank of Pakistan, Saeed Ahmed, along with two other accused persons — Naeem Mahmood and one of Mr Dar’s employees since 1991, Syed Mansoor Raza Rizvi — regarding their alleged involvement in “aiding and abetting” the former finance minister for a 91-time increase in his assets within a short span of time.

Following the filing of the reference against Mr Dar in the accountability court last September, NAB seized all of Mr Dar’s movable and immovable assets. These included a house in Gulberg III, Lahore; three plots in the Al-Falah Housing Society, Lahore; six acres of land in Islamabad; a two-kanal plot in the Parliamentarians Enclave, Islamabad; a plot in the Senate Cooperative Housing Society, Islamabad; another plot measuring two kanals and nine marlas in Islamabad; and six vehicles.

Published in Dawn, May 23rd, 2019