Panamagate inquiry: Opposition announces boycott of talks on ToRs with govt

Aitzaz lists six points of disagreement; Saad Rafique says won’t accept dictates

ISLAMABAD: The joint opposition has announced boycott of a parliamentary committee tasked to iron out differences over the mode of an inquiry into the Panamagate scandal. It says talks will resume only if the government comes up with a positive response to six core points of divergence on terms of reference (ToRs) for a proposed commission of inquiry on Panama Papers.

Interestingly, differences in the nine-party opposition bloc also came to light as two parties — the MQM and the ANP — stayed away from a news conference held at the residence of Senator Aitzaz Ahsan on Monday.

“The government has wrongly been claiming that disagreement persists only on including the prime minister’s name in the ToRs,” Ahsan said. “There are six points on which the government and the opposition are poles apart.”

He said the opposition was asking the government to introduce a special law to probe into what he called ‘extraordinary crime’. The Panama Papers claim that three scions of the Sharif family are among hundreds of Pakistani politicians and businessmen who had secreted their money in offshore tax havens.

“This is a financial crime. The Panama Papers indicate the trans-jurisdictional movement of capital through secret means and in secret accounts,” said Ahsan, who belongs to the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), the main opposition party in parliament.

“There should be a special law that should provide a framework for investigating a respondent himself, the one named in the Panama Papers, and his/her immediate family,” he added. “The government is not ready to accept this demand.”

The second point pertains to obtaining a power of attorney from the person named in the Panama Papers which will give investigators mandate to probe the money trail and to carry out forensic audit of all transactions.

Another point of disagreement, Ahsan said, was the burden of proof which, according to international standards, shifts to a respondent to establish that his/her income through which assets have been purchased is legal.

This special law should be applied without exception or concession to anyone, including Premier Nawaz Sharif and his family, Ahsan said while counting the fifth point of disagreement.

Any investigation into the Panamagate scandal should start from the Sharif family in order to “give them an opportunity to clear their names first”, he said, adding that this was not acceptable to the government.

Ahsan said the basic difference between the opposition and the government was that the former was interested in investigating the Panama Papers while the latter was dragging its feet on the issue.

Speaking on his part, PTI’s Shah Mehmood Qureshi said the government only wanted to buy time under the grab of negotiations over the ToRs. JI’s Sahibzada Tariq Ullah said: “We want to give a message to the nation that it is not the opposition but the government that is responsible for the delay in conducting investigations into the Panamagate scandal.

The government refused to formulate a special law and once again offered that it was ready to amend the Pakistan Commissions of Inquiry Act-1956 to investigate the revelations in the Panama Papers.

Talking to the media Railways Minister Khawaja Saad Rafique said the ToRs proposed by the opposition were indeed ‘dictation’, and that the opposition intended ‘target-killing of the PML-N’ under the garb of an inquiry into the Panama Papers.

He said some opposition parties had assumed the role of judges contrary to the fact that their role was limited to framing the ToRs for the proposed commission. “We will not allow anyone to make a draconian law on the pretext of holding accountability,” Rafique added.

Former law minister Zahid Hamid said the opposition wanted to hold a trial of the prime minister and his family.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 21^st, 2016.