ISLAMABAD: Italian police have arrested a fugitive from the law in Pakistan, Farhan Junejo, who is accused, along with the late Makhdoom Amin Faheem and several others, in a multibillion-rupee scandal involving the Trade Development Authority of Pakistan (TDAP).
Junejo had been declared a proclaimed offender by a Karachi court, and a red warrant had been issued against him by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) for Interpol to apprehend him.
The FIA Karachi chapter and headquarters have got the information about Junejo’s arrest in Italy and are working to get him repatriated to Pakistan through Interpol. Pakistan and Italy have no extradition treaty.
A senior FIA official told The News that the agency was dispatching the requisite documents related to the charges against Junejo to Italy, seeking his return.
Nearly two dozen people are accused of embezzling billions of rupees from the TDAP on account of a freight subsidy.
Junejo, who was directly inducted as an assistant commissioner in Sindh by the late Chief Minister Jam Sadiq Ali, and had also worked in Hala, the hometown of the Makhdooms. When Amin Faheem was the commerce minister, he had taken Junejo as his director on deputation. The TDAP falls under the commerce ministry.
An Italian newspaper reported in an Alessandria-datelined story that 47-year-old Junejo, who is now a British citizen, has been arrested in a hotel in the town on an international arrest warrant for an accusation of money laundering dating back to 2013 in Pakistan.
The report said Junejo was in the Italian town of Alessandria with his wife and small children on a holiday when he was caught. The police arrested him and put him in a prison in San Michele under the international mandate for extradition issued on Jan 18, 2018, it said. It added that according to what has been learned, Junejo’s wife and children have already returned to Britain.
Junejo is being defended by lawyers Alexandro Maria Tirelli and Federica Tartara. “Italy and Pakistan are unable to collaborate and the recent Saman Abbas case proves it,” explained Tirelli referring to the extradition of the parents of the slain girl, who disappeared in May in Novellara (Reggio Emilia) and is suspected of having been killed by them for opposing an arranged marriage.
The report said that the Junejo’s story has international ramifications and links that can be traced back to June 1991 when a group of terrorists killed his father Nabi Sher Junejo, a judge of a special anti-terrorism court. “It seems his father was opposing the military regime. It was a political murder that forced the whole family to flee Pakistan, surrendering to a personal diaspora that led almost all its members to immediately obtain protection in the United States.”
As per the report, Junejo had chosen Britain to reside in, which granted him political asylum and then citizenship. So, Junejo is a British citizen, not a small detail by virtue of diplomatic agreements with Pakistan which has repeatedly refused extradition by the UK, it said.
The report said that Italy did not have the bilateral extradition agreement as Rome discovered in the Saman Abbas affair. Her parents, Shabbar Abbas and Nazia Shaheen, among the main suspects, returned to Pakistan a few days after the alarm over her disappearance was raised. Investigative sources believe that they returned to Mandi Bahauddin. Pakistan’s ministry of justice has launched a procedure for the issuance of a “red notice” against the couple, which should allow the Pakistani authorities to search and capture them, the report said.
The extradition process for Junejo, the report said, provides that the first hearing is aimed at asking him whether he intends to avoid this procedure and be handed over spontaneously in the specific case to Pakistan, or whether the Italian judiciary should decide it.
In the last hearing, Junejo replied that he should not be repatriated to the justice of his country. The decision will then rest with the court of appeal of Italy.
The report said the next step for his lawyers was to ask for a hearing to be set to revoke precautionary measures in prison.
It said Saman Abbas’ case is still remembered in Italy and there is still a search for a solution on how to find the deceased girl’s parents. At the centre of this is a missing extradition agreement between Islamabad and Rome.
The report said that the Italian authorities are waiting for a formal extradition request with a documented file from Pakistan through its minister of justice. At that point, the court of appeal will examine its merits and hear the attorney general and defence lawyers to decide whether or not to extradite Junejo.
In 2018, the National Crime Agency (NCA) of the UK arrested and released Junejo on the Pakistani FIA’s allegation that he had laundered between Rs180-250 million from Pakistan. But the charge sheet prepared by the FIA didn’t appear to show how the money transferred to almost a dozen accounts were the proceeds of crimes or corruption.
The case filed by the FIA comprised 85 pages but only around 10 pages provided key information about the transfer of money from Pakistan to at least four locations abroad. The most important was the chart where the FIA had shown 11 transactions of the whole family showing each and every complex funds transfers including bank account numbers, passport details and addresses. The case file revealed that the FIR against Junejo was registered in 2013 and a final challan was submitted in court in 2017.