NAB appeals to IHC against Zardari’s acquittal

ISLAMABAD: More than a week after the acquittal of former president and PPP Co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari in the long-drawn SGS-Cotecna corruption reference, the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) approached the Islamabad High Court on Wednesday requesting it to overturn the findings because the trial court had issued its judgment without realising the gravity of the offence committed.

On Nov 24, the Islamabad accountability court exonerated Mr Zardari from the charges of using official position for pecuniary benefits in the 1998 SGS-Cotecna corruption references. Judge Mohammad Bashir acquitted the former president because of weak evidence as the entire case was based on photocopies instead of original documents.

The references accused Mr Zardari and former prime minister Benazir Bhutto of receiving six per cent of the total amount as kickbacks for awarding pre-shipment inspection contracts to SGS and Cotecna.

Know more: Accountability court acquits Zardari in SGS-Cotecna case

“The impugned order (trial court judgment) is based on surmises and conjectures as a result of which the accountability court misread the entire evidence. The same is not sustainable in the eyes of law and hence liable to be set aside,” said the NAB appeal filed through its prosecutor general office.

It said the trial court had kept on asking for the production of original record from the prosecution whereas the prosecution witness and NAB’s former deputy chairperson, Hassan Waseem Afzal, admitted before the court that he had produced the original record before the then Ehtesab bench comprising Justices Ehsanullah Haq Chaudhry and Raja Mohammad Khurshid. But, the appeal regretted, the trial court did not bother to summon the original record from the Lahore High Court’s Ehtesab bench.

It is important to note, the appeal said, that the LHC’s deputy registrar judicial in a Feb 19, 2000, letter clearly stated that the original record, along with other documents, had been sent to the Supreme Court in a different appeal filed by the accused in this case. But the trial court also did not care to summon the record from the SC office, which required to be placed on the file of the accountability court, NAB regretted.

“This fact is also available in the report of the registrar of the Islamabad accountability court, which was submitted before the court during the proceedings of the case,” the appeal said.

Without collecting the original record and documents from the SC office, it deplored, the trial court proceeded to decide the entire case in a hasty manner merely on an application filed under Section 265-K of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) which empowered the trial court to acquit the accused at any stage.

The application was instituted by Mr Zardari when he appeared before the trial court as the reference got revived after the lifting of immunity available to the president under Article 248 of the Constitution.

Co-accused A.R. Siddiqui, former chairperson of the Central Board of Revenue (now Federal Board of Revenue), had already been acquitted by a Rawalpindi accountability court on July 30, 2011.

Published in Dawn, December 3rd, 2015