PTI protests ECP order rejecting its appeals against scrutiny

[ahlam1399]

ISLAMABAD: The foreign funding case petitioner, Akbar S Babar, through his counsel, has moved the Election Commission of Pakistan for starting contempt proceedings against the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) leadership for walking out and boycotting its scrutiny committee meeting Wednesday.The PTI team of lawyers and financial representatives had protested the detailed ECP order of October 10, 2019 whereby, it had rejected all four PTI applications seeking secrecy of scrutiny and barring the petitioner of the foreign funding case to participate in the scrutiny committee meetings.The order termed the foreign funding case as ‘the worst historical example of abuse of the process of law’ and accused PTI of delaying the scrutiny process ‘one way or the other’.In the hand written application filed, the petitioner’s counsel Badar Iqbal Chaudhery narrated the entire episode of PTI walkout and claims that before boycotting the proceedings, the PTI legal team consulted his clients for almost 45 minutes and announced that they had been ‘specifically instructed to boycott’ the scrutiny proceedings.The application requests the ECP to take cognizance of the PTI conduct and accordingly initiate contempt proceedings against the leadership and pass appropriate orders in the light of earlier findings on the subject when PTI Chairman Imran Khan had submitted an apology for earlier contempt of the ECP.The application also requests the ECP to direct the Scrutiny Committee to compile its report as both parties claim to have submitted all the relevant documents.Earlier, the Election Commission of Pakistan has in its five-page order strongly objected to the Deputy Attorney General Saqlain Haider, representing a political party against the interest of the state. Haider is the ruling Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s counsel in the long-continuing foreign funding case.The order, released to the media, points out, “Saqlain Haider, learned counsel for the respondent, who is stated to have been appointed as Deputy Attorney General, had no right to appear for political party against the interest of the state”. The detailed order terms ‘this case being the worst historical example of abuse of the process of law’.The Election Commission states that the PTI lawyer ‘should rather protect the state and not the party which are two completely different entities’ and that ‘the learned counsel should have preferred the state over the interests of a political party after his present appointment as Deputy Attorney General’.The ECP order terms the PTI demand to exclude the petitioner from the scrutiny of the 23 PTI bank accounts revealed on the instructions of the State Bank of Pakistan as ‘frivolous as usual because such accounts came to knowledge only because of the complaint of the petitioner. Such accounts rather support the complainant so as those are not accounted for’.The Election Commission billed as interesting the PTI demand from the committee to share details of its accounts and ‘on this frivolous excuse the matter was delayed for considerable time as usual’.Earlier, in an unprecedented move Wednesday, PTI lawyers and the finance team walked out of the ECP Scrutiny Committee meeting and announced that ‘we have been specifically instructed by the respondent (PTI) to boycott the Scrutiny proceedings’ in protest over the detailed ECP order of October 10, rejecting the four PTI applications demanding secrecy to the scrutiny of its accounts besides other objections to the scrutiny process.The ECP order had directed the two parties to appear before the scrutiny committee on October 14 and complete the scrutiny process as early as possible. However, no progress could be made on October 14 meeting as the PTI requested one more adjournment citing absence of their finance team that had gone abroad.The detailed ECP order terms ‘this case being the worst historical example of abuse of the process of law’ and it accused the PTI of delaying the scrutiny process ‘one way or the other’.The order states that, “the Commission is confronted with an unprecedented phenomena of delay, caused by the respondent exploiting the presence or existence of the complainant”.On PTI’s demand to exclude the petitioner and PTI founding member Akbar S. Babar from the scrutiny process, the order states ‘the request for exclusion of the complainant from the scrutiny was not justified because the latter had to provide material evidence to the committee’.http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/com/cwEr/~4/i8OF1_rz9vg

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