Daily Times

KARACHI: Former petroleum minister who is accused of terror facilitation, Dr Asim Hussain on Saturday said that he was innocent and paying for someone else’s tussle.

Talking to media after hearing of Rs 462 billion corruption reference against him, Dr Asim said that he was not well and suffering from pain in the back for several days. He said that Ijaz Chaudhry allegedly signing summaries and not him. Even Chaudhry is innocent, he claimed.

The accountability court adjourned the hearing until May 26 after recording statement of a witness and completion of cross-examination. The witness named Mukhtar Ahmed is an employee of a company that audits Ziauddin Hospital, the medical facility owned by the accused. He presented a compilation of audit reports of the Ziauddin Hospital from 2005 to 2015.

Mukhtar told the court that he did not prepare or signed the audit reports about Ziauddin Hospital’s annual accounts. He said he was employed as assistant in Administration branch of M/s KPMG Taseer Hadi & Company.

Replying to questions from defense counsel, Mukhtar stated that his employer company had instructed to produce the annual reports of the audited accounts of last 10 years, from financial year 2004 to 2014. He said his company received a letter from NAB authorities for production of the copies of the annual reports of the Ziauddin Hospital. To another question from the defence counsel, the witness said that he had gone alone to the NAB office for submission of the record and that the NAB investigation officer did not visit his company’s office. He also said that the record shown in the court has no signatures of the witness.

It may be mentioned here that on last Saturday’s hearing, the first prosecution witness, Raheel Shahnawaz, had said that no fraud was detected in the audit of Ziauddin Hospital audit reports. He had said that they did not find any deviation in the income and expenses of the hospital; therefore they had issued the clean certificate of audit verifications. Raheel, a prosecution witness from M/s BDO Eabrahim (Pvt) Company, had told the court that the sources of fund of the organization and its expenditures were strictly checked and if there was any suspicious transaction discovered it would have mentioned in the audit report.

Dr Hussain was nabbed by Rangers in August 2015 from Sindh Higher Education Commission (HEC) office for allegedly treating terrorists and target killers backed by political parties in his hospital. A case was lodged in North Nazimabad police station after 90-day remand of the alleged culprit expired. NAB has filed a corruption case against him that was followed by another reference in an accountability court.