Daily Times

Federal Minister for Information and Broadcasting Fawad Chaudhry Sunday said the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) should scrutinize and publicise the funding sources of Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP), Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) besides other registered political parties so that the people could compare and evaluate the parties. Addressing a press conference in Lahore along with State Minister for Information and Broadcasting Farrukh Habib at the Governor’s House, Fawad said the ECP’s scrutiny committee had scrutinized the foreign funding source of the PTI but it conducted no significant proceedings in the foreign funding case of the PPP and PML-N. He said the PTI had submitted the record of more than 40,000 donors – consisting of about 22 volumes – to the ECP so that the party funding sources could be publicized.

The minister said the PML-N had under-valued its assets, as it showed the value of a house in F-7 sector of Islamabad as only 27 million, while two transactions of Rs145 million and Rs86.7 million were also deposited into the PML-N account in 2013, and the source of such transactions to the PML-N account was also unknown, but the PTI had submitted the record of its each donor, even of the one who donated one dollar or 10 dollars to the PTI, he maintained.

Fawad said the PML-N had claimed an office, situated in F-8 but it was yet to be ascertained who was paying funds for running financial matters of the office, adding that the audit of PML-N’s Punjab office had not been conducted from 2013 to 2015 while the balance of Rs17.5 million was available in its account without known source of income, he asserted.

The minister said Nawaz Sharif had donated 100 million rupees to the party, while out of that donated amount, 45 million rupees were returned to Nawaz Sharif so the said method was used for money whitening.

Fawad said a company situated in London was collecting and arranging funds for the PML-N but still there was no record of sources of the company’s funds.

The minister said there was no PPP funding information available from 2009 to 2012. He said the PPP opened a source account and deposited 420 million rupees into it without apprising the ECP about the source of this amount, whereas the PPP had also showed amounts of Rs3.6 million, Rs3.5 million and Rs2.5 million into the audited account from 2013 to 2015 without mentioning the source of funding.

The PPP had claimed that it spent about Rs230 million during the general elections 2013 but the source was not mentioned, he asserted. The minister said the PPPP, under the control of then Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States Hussain Haqqani, had also established a company in USA which collected funds of millions of dollars for the PPPP without known source so there should be accountability of all the political parties.

“The ECP should scrutinize the accounts of political parties in phases, as it could scrutinize the accounts of three major political parties in first phase and make them public and then rest of the others, including Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), Jamiat Ulema Islam (JUI) TLP in second phase, he added.