Daily Times

National Assembly Speaker Asad Qaiser on Wednesday distanced himself from the ‘horse-trading’ video which allegedly shows PTI MPAs receiving money to vote against their party in the Senate elections 2018.

Qaiser took to Twitter to say that the video had not been shot at his official residence, rather the place that can be seen in it is from the Speaker House in Peshawar. “The place that you see in the video is from the Speaker House in Peshawar. I have no link whatsoever with this episode,” he said.

Qaiser further said that in 2018, Prime Minister Imran Khan had informed him about several PTI MPAs selling their votes for money, adding that the entire party had decided to take action against the PTI MPAs who were involved in the controversy. “Statements like these are only an attempt to deflect from the actual issue,” he said, referring to the statement against him by former PTI MPA Mayar.

A day earlier when the video went viral on social media, former PTI MPA Ubaid Ullah Mayar confessed that he and the other lawmakers from the party had received Rs10 million as bribe to sell their votes. Mayar had said that he had taken the money on the ‘directives of the then chief minister of KP, Pervez Khattak’. He had said that the PTI-led provincial government had ‘paid Rs10 million to all MPAs’. He had said that incident took place at the National Assembly speaker’s house and it was the ‘provincial government which paid money to the MPAs and then made a video’.

Meanwhile, Chief Minister Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Mahmood Khan Wednesday accepted the resignation of Sultan Muhammad Khan, a day after a purported video of horse-trading involving him went viral.