‘President Zardari does not even have a bank account abroad’, Bakhtawar Bhutto’s statement triggers debate

• Social media users mocked claim that president has no bank account abroad, while sharing old asset records tied to Bilawal Bhutto Zardari; public disclosures show distinction between President Asif Ali Zardari’s filings and foreign assets declared by his son

Bakhtawar Bhutto Zardari’s defence of President Asif Ali Zardari on X set off a fresh political argument on Sunday, after she said her father “does not even have a bank account abroad” and that his “entire assets & wealth are very proudly invested in his homeland.”

The post drew a wave of replies, reposts and quote-posts, with some users responding sarcastically and others circulating screenshots of asset declarations to challenge the claim. In the material shared online, some users mocked the statement by suggesting the president should be enrolled in the Benazir Income Support Programme, while others posted old declaration pages showing properties, shares, deposits and bank balances held abroad.

But the documents circulated in response did not all point to the same person.

One key set of screenshots shared in replies appears to match Bilawal Bhutto Zardari’s 2018-19 statement of assets and liabilities published in the Gazette of Pakistan. Those pages list immovable and movable assets held outside Pakistan, including Dubai properties, shares, loans, term deposits, savings accounts and cash, with total declared assets of over Rs1.54 billion. Bakhtawar, replying to one such post, did not deny those holdings; instead, she said they were declared, inherited from his mother and not hidden.

That response is significant because it narrows the dispute. Her original post was about President Asif Ali Zardari, while many of the viral screenshots being used against her relate to Bilawal Bhutto Zardari’s public declarations, not the president’s.

On the record, there is evidence supporting at least part of her claim about her father’s bank accounts. In an affidavit submitted to the Supreme Court in 2018, Asif Ali Zardari stated that he owned neither movable nor immovable property nor any bank account outside Pakistan.

A 2018-19 Gazette asset statement for Asif Ali Zardari also lists bank accounts in Pakistani banks and leaves the “held outside Pakistan” section blank for immovable property. The same filing shows domestic assets, business capital within Pakistan and cash and bank accounts in local institutions.

At the same time, more recent reporting based on data available through FAFEN and drawn from Election Commission records shows a more complicated longer-term picture. It was reported in February 2025 that Asif Ali Zardari declared Rs2 billion in assets in his general election 2024 disclosures with no property outside Pakistan, but said that in his 2018 disclosures he had declared Rs99 million of assets abroad. The same report said Bilawal Bhutto Zardari declared more than Rs1.9 billion in recent disclosures, including about Rs1.7 billion of assets abroad.

That means two things can be true at once: Bakhtawar may be correct that her father publicly declared no foreign bank account in the filings and affidavit now being cited, while critics are also correct that the Bhutto-Zardari family’s publicly declared wealth includes substantial foreign-held assets in the case of Bilawal, and earlier disclosures reported by media also referred to foreign assets for Asif Ali Zardari.

The online backlash appears to have been driven less by the narrow wording of her original claim and more by how it was received in Pakistan’s wider political context. Users treated the post as a sweeping defence of the family’s wealth, then answered it with old declarations, sarcasm and side-by-side screenshots aimed at testing whether the public record matched the rhetoric.

For now, the record visible from public disclosures suggests that the most viral rebuttals blurred the line between the president’s own declarations and those of his son. That distinction has become central to the controversy, because the debate is no longer just about whether wealth exists abroad, but whose wealth, what kind of asset, and whether it was publicly declared in the first place.