ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) lawmaker Rana Tanveer Hussain was appointed as the chairman of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on Thursday.
The position fell vacant when National Assembly Opposition Leader Shehbaz Sharif resigned from the post earlier this month. Later on, National Assembly Speaker Asad Qaiser had convened a meeting of the PAC for the election of its new chairman on Nov 28 (today).
In his resignation note, which was submitted on November 18 – a day before his departure to London with his brother, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif – the PML-N president had nominated Hussain as his replacement.
“I would like to propose that MNA Rana Tanveer may be considered for this position as decided by the joint opposition parties,” Shehbaz wrote to the speaker.
According to media reports, while the PML-N claimed that it had taken the other opposition parties on board on the nomination of Hussain as the new PAC chairman, a PPP stalwart had said that they had not been consulted before his nomination.
However, today, Hussain’s name was endorsed for the position by Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf’s (PTI) Sardar Nasrullah Khan Dreshak, PML-N Senator Mushahid Hussain Syed and PPP leader Raja Pervaiz Ashraf.
After his appointment, Hussain thanked his party and opposition party members. He promised that he would run PAC with neutrality.
Shehbaz had been elected as PAC chairman unopposed on December 22 last year after Prime Minister Imran Khan finally surrendered before the opposition’s demand in the wake of their threats to withdraw from all the National Assembly committees.
The Committee has been non-functional as Shehbaz has not presided over its meeting for nearly six months. It was in May that Shehbaz, who was on a private visit to the UK at the time, had first announced his decision to quit PAC’s chairmanship, a position he had secured after prolonged wrangling between the government and the opposition parties.
