In court: Orient Pharma owners granted interim bail

LAHORE:

The three brothers who own the pharmaceutical company housed in the building that collapsed on Monday morning were given interim bail against surety bonds of Rs50,000 each.

Additional District and Sessions Judge Chaudhary Nazir Ahmed told the men to cooperate with the police investigation. He then ordered that the case record be submitted in court on the date of the next hearing, February 15.

Petitioners Zaheer Iqbal, the chief executive; Zafar Iqbal and Zubair Iqbal, both directors of Orient Laboratories filed for pre-arrest bails through their counsel Sardar Khurram Latif Khan Khosa. Khosa asked the court to grant them bail because they had no criminal record and were innocent of the charges against them in the FIR.

He said that the petitioners’ pharma company, set up in 1983, was licenced and had been paying its taxes. In their application, the petitioners said that they had bought the Hassan Town property in 1987 and had gotten an industrial electricity connection as well as a commercial gas connection.

They called the incident – that had resulted in a huge financial loss as well as loss of life – “unfortunate”. “We are the aggrieved in this case,” they said, adding that if they were arrested, they’d suffer irreparable loss to their reputation.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 10^th, 2012.