A founding member of the Pakistan Tehreeke Insaf (PTI) party, Akbar S. Babar, had filed a case in 2014, alleging that the party had collected nearly $3 million in illegal foreign funds through two offshore companies, Dawn reported.
Akbar alleged that money was sent through illegal ‘hundi’ channels from the Middle East to certain accounts of “PTI employees” and that the foreign accounts used to collect the funds were not mentioned in the annual audit reports submitted to the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP).
For investigation in this matter, a scrutiny committee was formed in March last year to complete an audit of PTI’s funding sources in one month. Its mandate was later extended for an indefinite period.
After the beginning of the probe, PTI submitted four applications to the ECP seeking secrecy during the scrutiny of its foreign funding sources.
However, the ECP rejected all four applications of PTI and instructed the scrutiny committee to continue its work and instructed PTI representatives to appear before the committee on Oct 14.
Foreign Funding Case
Akbar S. Babar had filed the foreign funding case before the ECP in 2014 after he developed differences with PTI Chairman Imran Khan over alleged internal corruption and abuse of laws governing political funding.
For over a year, the proceedings of the case were delayed in the ECP as the PTI had filed a writ petition in October 2015 in the Islamabad High Court (IHC) seeking to restrain the ECP from scrutinising its accounts.
Later in February 2017, the IHC had remanded the case back to the ECP for a fresh review of its jurisdiction. On May 8 of the same year, a full bench of the ECP had once again declared its complete jurisdiction over the matter and stated that the PTI had failed to produce any evidence that the petitioner had been expelled from the party and hence lost the right to question the PTI’s accounts.
In March 2018, a scrutiny panel had been formed to look into PTI’s foreign funding accounts to search for any wrongdoing.
