ISLAMABAD: Hitting back at criticism over his anti-parliament comments made during a protest demonstration in Lahore a day before, Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan on Thursday said that people like Nawaz Sharif and Khawaja Asif had destroyed the parliament. “Parliament is the name of a building. It is parliamentarians who take the parliament forward or destroy it,” Imran said, adding, “Give me a precedent of any assembly in the world which makes a law to favour a culprit who stole from the people and lied in the court. What you actually did was make a thief sit on Pakistan’s coffers.” Sharifs are involved in money laundering worth Rs 1.74 billion through FZE Capital, Hill Metals and other companies in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the PTI chief claimed. He alleged that Nawaz Sharif sent approximately Rs 800 million to his daughter Maryam Nawaz Sharif, who sent Rs 25m back to him. Around Rs240m were laundered through employees of the Sharif family and Punjab Police via the Hill Metals establishment, he added. “We are talking about the prime minister of this country who was doing this,” he said. “Had this been a civilised nation, he would have been in jail rather than asking ‘mujhe kyun nikala’ (why was I thrown out)?” Imran alleged that Sharif family was involved in laundering money through a network of 16 companies, including FZE Capital and Hill Metals. He claimed that transactions through bank accounts of multiple people, who, according to him, were drivers and other employees of Nawaz, employees of Sharif Medical City and constables of Punjab police, reveal that the companies were solely created for the purpose of money laundering.
Published in Daily Times, January 19th 2018.
