Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: Supreme Court (SC) has on Tuesday started hearing the appeal of National Accountability Bureau (NAB) to order reopening of the Hudaibiya Paper Mills case that involved some 1.2 billion rupees.

According to details, the 3-member bench headed by Justice Munir Alam has started the hearing of the NAB plea. The other two judges include Justice Qazi Faiz Isa and Justice Mazhar Alam Miankhel. The case had been initiated back in 2000 but wasn’t pursued by NAB later on after the former Prime Minister (PM) Nawaz Sharif went into exile. The case was later quashed by Lahore High Court in 2014.

The bench asked the NAB prosecutor some formal and key questions to open the case and the hearing was adjourned till tomorrow (Wednesday).

It is pertinent to mention here that it was this case, in which Finance Minister Ishaq Dar had submitted his infamous confessional statement. The minister currently on a long vacation had agreed to become the approver in the case and shared the details of the money laundering that was allegedly done by the Sharif family under the guise of this mill.

Ishaq Dar confessed in the statement that the Sharif family had laundered the money and he had also assisted them in doing so. Dar wasn’t charged in the case since he was granted exemption for assisting the state.

However, Ishaq Dar later retracted from the statement, claiming that he had been coerced to issue this statement. The case has been reinitiated after NAB filed a plea before SC on September 20, 2017 in light of the Panama case judgment against the former PM Nawaz Sharif in which the apex court had ordered NAB to file for reopening of the case.