Genuine parties, people to ensure free, fair polls, says Sharif

Former PM says amending contempt of court laws on his party’s manifesto for 2018 elections

ISLAMABAD: Responding to the top judge’s recent remarks that the Supreme Court will play its role to ensure free and fair elections this year, the deposed prime minister Nawaz Sharif has said all the ‘genuine parties’ and people will play their role to ensure that the upcoming elections are free and fair.

“Our party [the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz], all genuine parties as well as the people of Pakistan will play their role for free and fair elections on time. We will do whatever we can to guarantee that,” Sharif said on Friday while talking to reporters inside the accountability court.

He was responding to a question about the Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Justice Mian Saqib Nisar’s remark that SC will try to ensure that the upcoming polls are held in a free and fair manner.

When asked which parties he referred to as non-genuine, Sharif said the ones which made tall claims about principled stance but fell flat on their faces during recent the Senate elections.

Two major opposition parties – the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) – joined apparently hands at the March 12 election for the Senate chairman and deputy chairman and managed to defeat the ruling party’s candidate with a big margin.

“They [the PPP and the PTI] have now been exposed. Their way of politics is to deceive people, manipulate youth, always looking for the umpire’s signal, using backdoor for politics and they do not have the courage to compete in the field,” he said.



“Perhaps, that is the reason that their rallies have a meager 100 or 200 people. This shows their condition and the condition of their ‘unison’ in bringing Sadiq Sanjrani as Senate chairman,” he added.

The three-time PM also talked about judicial reforms, adding that changes in contempt laws will be on his party’s manifesto in the next elections. “Reforms pertaining to contempt law are need of the hour, nation and country,” he said.

Sharif and many leaders of his party are facing contempt of court charges due to their diatribe against judiciary in the wake of his disqualification by the apex court on July 28, 2017 in Panama Papers case.

Proceedings of accountability court

Meanwhile, the Accountability Court Judge Muhmmad Bashir resumed hearing of the Avenfield Apartments reference wherein the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) head, Wajid Zia, continued to record his statement against Sharif, Maryam Nawaz and Captain (retd) Safdar for a third consecutive hearing.

Surprisingly, when Zia produced an ‘original’ letter of Qatari Prince Muhammad Bin Jasim al Thani obtained from the SC in a sealed envelope before the court to match with the one of the photocopies of the prince’s letter he produced on March 15, it turned out to be different than the one submitted by the JIT chief a day earlier.

Maryam and Safdar’s counsel, Amjad Pervaiz raised objection over the admissibility of another letter by the Qatari prince. Subsequently, the court did not allow the letter to be exhibited as evidence and directed Zia to submit an application if he wanted to submit the letter as new evidence.

Zia and the National Accountability Bureau’s (NAB) prosecution team simply took back the letter after noting the development in day’s proceedings on defence counsel Pervaiz and Khawaja Haris’ request.



Zia also presented several documents, including draft of the agreement held between Al Taufiq Company and Hudabiya Paper Mills, land registry of London flats and Nescol Company.

The court made the land registry of the Nelson and Nescol related to the London flat a part of the judicial record with defence counsels’ objections.

During the hearing, defence counsels continued to raise objections on the documents, including on the applications of the Sharif family and expert’s opinion produced before the SC by other parties during the hearing of Panamagate last year, by Zia as they were either photocopies, photocopies of the photocopies, ‘irrelevant’ or not authored and collected by Zia.

In addition, certain documents were found different in terms of missing or carrying additional details in the copies available with the court, NAB and respondents. Some of the documents did not contain noting, stamps, signatures and one document had some missing pages.

NAB prosecutor Afzal Qureshi said the contents were same but the court said the documents should have been exactly the same with all the parties in all the documents.

Qureshi said NAB office has provided copies and mistakenly pages are missing from one file, adding that the court may exhibit the document and NAB will provide the documents later on.



Pervaiz said NAB is making assumptions, adding the documents are inadmissible being pleadings of Sharifs and others before the Supreme Court and new to defence team. Under the law, he reminded Zia, that Zia was not allowed to freely discuss things with NAB prosecutors while recording his statement.

Among other objections, Pervaiz said the photocopies carrying attestation stamp by the SC office does not fulfill the requirements of the Qanoon-e-Shahadat Order, 1984, and cannot be exhibited.

The court gave a short break to NAB and Zia for putting documents in order as they were not properly arranged. The court resumed proceedings after the break but later adjourned the case till March 20, observing that documents were not being smoothly produced and consuming a lot of time.