Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) has requested the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) to scrutinise funding the party received from abroad in secret.

The ECP is currently hearing a case over the violation of the law pertaining to receiving party funds, and has issued a notification to the petitioner and PTI’s founding member Akbar S. Babar to hear the PTI’s application on the 28th of May.

The ECP established a scrutiny committee on the 3rd of April to complete the scrutiny process in one month. The committee was headed by the director general law and comprises two auditors from the defence establishment.

The committee, however, failed to make any significant progress because the PTI failed to provide its financial statements.

The PTI, on its part, opposed the committee’s Terms of Reference (TOR) and voiced its displeasure over the lack of secrecy in the scrutiny process.

The petitioner expressed shock over the PTI’s decision to pursue secrecy in the scrutiny case, claiming that if the PTI’s hands had been clean, it would not have had to resort to secrecy.

The petitioner also alleged that PTI was reluctant to produce its financial statements because this would reveal the illegal funding the party had received.

The petitioner, Mr. Babar, filed the case against the PTI in November 2014 and accused the party’s leadership of corruption and of receiving illegal funding. Proceedings in the case were, however, delayed for a year because the PTI had filed a writ petition in the Islamabad High Court (IHC) in 2015 which aimed to curb the ECP’s ability to scrutinise its accounts.

In February 2017, however, the IHC remanded the case back to the ECP and on the 8th of May, 2017, a full bench of the ECP asserted its jurisdiction to oversee the case.