Govt wants Salman back from UK but legal issues crop up

LONDON: The National Accountability Bureau (NAB) says it will contact the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) and Interpol to bring back PML-N President Shahbaz Sharif’s son Salman Shahbaz from London but it is practically difficult, as it involves a number of legal reasons.

Since coming into power two years ago, PTI government ministers have made several high octane announcements to bring back Ishaq Dar, Hasan and Hussain Nawaz and several others including Salman Shahbaz but there has been no progress beyond writing letters to the Interpol and the UK Home Office.

According to a NAB spokesperson, non-bailable arrest warrants have been issued for Salman and the Lahore High Court has declared him a fugitive in a money laundering case allegedly involving Salman and Hamza.

Salman had previously rejected the charges as “baseless and frivolous” and said Prime Minister Imran Khan had questions to answer about his own “unexplained assets”. He has maintained that he brought money from abroad into Pakistan for investment and that was not money laundering and that each and everything he owned in Pakistan had been declared with the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR).

Last year in December, the anti-graft body had issued orders to freeze 23 properties of Shahbaz Sharif, Hamza and Salman for allegedly acquiring assets beyond their known sources of income and money laundering.

Leading criminal and extradition lawyer Barrister Moeen Khan said the case against Salman was “weak” and did not meet the required threshold for the UK courts for extradition. Khan said from what has been said in press conferences so far, the Pakistan government ministers had not established corruption, and if there was anything wrong, they should take the matter to the courts in Pakistan and let the facts get established through a fair trial.

“In the absence of any charges and trial and exhaustion of all legal remedies, there’s zero chance of UK government doing anything against Salman, or for that matter, anyone else. For extradition applications to succeed, there have to be seriously strong grounds and the whole process takes years in courts,” Khan said.

He said there were questions as to why the authorities had not charged Salman in over two years. When contacted to comment on what will be the defence of Salman if at all the PTI govt approached Interpol, a legal team member of Salman said he had made complete declarations in the FBR records and all the transactions were approved by the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP).

“The government accepts that all payments were through the legal banking channels and everything was legal,” said the lawyer, adding that the FBR had found no evidence of any wrongdoing.

The team member said Salman was investigated for two years and every kind of state resource was used but there was no allegation of corruption, corrupt practices or kickbacks. He said the money brought by Salman from abroad to Pakistan was legal and there was no question of money laundering in doing something, which was protected by the laws of the land.

He said Salman never held any political position, never assumed any public office, and never ran for Parliament. He said the NAB’s main mandate was to investigate cases related to corruption in the public domain and losses to the public exchequer but here it was his private business inherited from his grandfather. The lawyer said Salman’s businesses had nothing to do with the state or its finances and the allegations being made against him were for media consumption and a political witch-hunt.

The legal source commented that it was telling itself that the NAB had not framed charges or filed references against Salman because there was no allegation until today about corruption and kickbacks. The source said the government was running a media trial of Salman for political reasons.