PTI accounts perusal report to be unveiled

ISLAMABAD: The petitioner of the long pending PTI foreign funding case will make public the fact finding (perusal) of PTI accounts on July 13 here, which has been prepared by two financial experts, employed on the direction of the Election Commission of Pakistan.

The electoral body had given this direction in its order issued on April 14. On the contrary to the petitioner, PTI had decided not to appoint financial experts. The perusal witnessed a number of alleged hiccups.

The report will be unveiled here at a local hotel and the petitioner Akbar S Babar alongside his team of lawyers, led by Syed Ahmad Hassan Shah, assisted by Badar Iqbal Chaudhry, will brief the media on the findings of the exercise.

However, before that event, it was learnt that Babar will submit the report before the Election Commission of Pakistan besides submitting it before the Supreme Court of Pakistan. It is pertinent that the ECP had allowed 55 hours for perusal of PTI documents by two independent financial experts.

Interestingly, the ECP Scrutiny Committee had refused outright to allow perusal of original PTI bank statements requisitioned through the State Bank of Pakistan back in July 2018. The financial analysts were also not allowed even to use laptops or cell phones or make copies during the perusal process.

The scrutiny of PTI accounts under the foreign funding case originally started in March 2018 by a three-member Scrutiny Committee constituted by the ECP to complete the process in one month. However, the process could not be completed in over three years.

In applications before the ECP, Babar had claimed that not a single PTI bank statement out of the six admitted international bank accounts was shared for perusal. Likewise, the committee refused to investigate the private bank accounts of four PTI central office employees who were authorised by the PTI Finance Board in July 2011 to receive donations from within Pakistan and abroad.

Similarly, no details of funds received in the personal bank accounts of PTI employees were shared for perusal. The perusal of PTI documents was authorised after repeated applications for access to PTI accounts by the petitioner. In the order, the ECP had also directed the Scrutiny Committee to finalise its findings by the end of May this year. However, there is no word on the status of the Scrutiny Committee report to be submitted before the ECP by the end of May 2021.

The committee meetings remain suspended since June 8, 2021 when it last met for unexplained reasons. However, the scrutiny committee failed to meet a number of deadlines set by the ECP to submit its report.

The original TOR of the Scrutiny Committee had directed it to complete scrutiny in one month. Subsequently, its mandate was extended for another two months and eventually for an indefinite period.

In its order of October 10, 2019, the ECP had directed the committee to conclude scrutiny as soon as possible. Subsequently, in its order of June 02, 2020, the ECP had directed the Scrutiny Committee to submit report by August 17, 2020.

However, the report was rejected by the ECP in its order of August 27, 2020 as the report failed to authenticate evidence, conduct a probe, and come to definitive conclusions. The ECP once again set a new deadline of six weeks for the committee to conduct the scrutiny afresh. The deadline again passed without any report.

It is being speculated that the findings of the PTI accounts by two financial experts who conducted perusal on the directives of the ECP may be a turning point of the over seven years long PTI foreign funding case as facts have been extracted from documents the PTI had submitted.