ISLAMABAD -- The National Accountability Bureau (NAB) has denied that it declared the Sharif brothers -- Mian Nawaz Sharif and Shahbaz Sharif -- as defaulters.
In a late night Press release on Friday in response to Shahbaz Sharif's rejoinder to media reports that the bureau had declared him and Nawaz Sharif loan defaulters, the NAB said it had, instead, cleared their nomination papers. It explained that it had only given the details of cases against the Sharif brothers to the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) but had never declared them defaulter.
| You begin to wonder if Pakistan would just be better off if it shot or deported everyone in the country named Sharif, Musharraf, Bhutto or Zardari... |
| That'd just clear the way for the Chaudrys. |
Meanwhile, the NAB also clarified that to facilitate the commission in conducting fair and free election 2013, the bureau was providing the information sought by ECP about different candidates.
Seaparately, Presidential spokesman Farhatullah Babar on Saturday refuted Sharif's allegation that President Asif Ali Zardari was behind the conspiracy to malign Sharifs by dubbing them as loan defaulters. Babar said the president had nothing to do with the preparation of lists of defaulters by the State Bank of Pakistan, the NAB and the the ECP.
In a related development, the SBP acknowledged that it had wrongly listed a senior leader of the Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaaf (PTI) Jehangir Tarin as defaulter of Rs440 million when he was ex-officio chairman of Taxila Heavy Mechanical Complex, a state-owned enterprise. |