Daily Times

Minister for Information and Broadcasting Fawad Chaudhry Saturday said that the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) had so far recovered Rs 33 billion in the Asif Ali Zardari fake accounts case.

In a tweet, the minister said the recovered amount is equal to about $200 million. “In light of this, the volume of corruption that had taken place in the country could easily be gauged. Past rulers had looted Pakistan, particularly Sindh,” he reminded.

Fawad noted that the actual volume of corruption in the fake account case was a whopping Rs 5,000 billion.

This is not the first time that the federal minister has fired a broadside at the Sindh government for their alleged corruption. In his recent visit to Karachi, Chaudhry had accused the Sindh rulers and the top PPP leadership of misusing public funds to launder money abroad. He had also advocated monitoring the use of public funds given by the federal government to Sindh through a ‘third party’. He had claimed that money belonging to the Sindh government was being retrieved from Dubai, Canada and Europe.

The fake accounts case first surfaced in 2015 when the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), on the basis of a tip-off, had registered the case against Pakistan Stock Exchange former chairman Hussain Lawai, who was widely believed to be close to former president Zardari. As the investigation lingered on, the Supreme Court in July 2018 took suo motu notice of the slow-paced probe of the case and directed the FIA to submit a detailed report on the matter.

Several bigwigs, including Asif Ali Zardari, his sister Faryal Talpur, Lawai and Omni Group’s Anwar Majeed had been nominated in the case. Besides, Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah and PPP Chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari were also included in the probe.

A joint investigation team (JIT) was subsequently formed in September 2018 on request of the FIA to probe the matter, which in its initial report to the Supreme Court stated that a close nexus had been found between a troika of the Zardari Group, Omni Group and Bahria Town. The JIT report revealed that initially at least 29 bank accounts identified as fake had been used for money laundering of Rs42 billion.

According to the JIT report, the two groups amassed assets through misappropriation of loans, government funds, kickbacks and proceeds of crime. The top court had subsequently ordered the Zardari Group, Omni Group, Bahria Town, Faryal Talpur and others, including contractors/ builders, to file their comments on the JIT report.