LAHORE: Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) vice president and Punjab Assembly Opposition Leader Hamza Shahbaz on Tuesday filed a bail request in Lahore High Court (LHC) in a case pertaining to assets beyond sources.
National Accountability Bureau (NAB) Chairman Justice (r) Javed Iqbal and the agency’s Lahore director general have been nominated in the petition.
Shahbaz has maintained that the reference was filed 14 months after his arrest in June 2019. Keeping an accused in jail for this long is equivalent to sentencing them before the trial, he stated.
The agency had arrested the PML-N leader from inside the high court after his lawyer withdrew the application for bail extension in the two corruption cases.
He along with his father National Assembly opposition leader and PML-N President Shehbaz Sharif was indicted in November last in the Rs7 billion reference involving charges of money laundering and assets beyond means.
The reference mainly accuses Sharif of being a beneficiary of the assets held in the name of his family members and frontmen, who had no sources to acquire such assets.
It says the family members and the frontmen of the family received fake foreign remittances of billions in their personal bank accounts. In addition to these remittances, the bureau says, billions of rupees were laundered by way of foreign pay orders, which were deposited in the personal bank accounts of Hamza and his brother Suleman Shahbaz.
The reference further says Sharif and his family failed to justify the sources of funds used for the acquisition of assets.
