Nawaz Sharif held guilty of corruption, gets 10 yrs in prison
Daughter given 7year sentence in case pertaining to family’s acquisition of apartments in London
A Pakistani court on Friday found ousted prime minister Nawaz Sharif guilty of corruption and sentenced him to 10 years in prison, a major blow for his PML-N party ahead of general elections on July 25.
The accountability or antigraft court ruled there were corrupt practices linked to the Sharif family’s acquisition of four apartments in the posh Park Lane area of London in the 1990s. The verdict threatens to end the career of 68-year-old Sharif, a political survivor who couldn’t complete any of his three terms as PM.
Besides Sharif, his daughter Maryam Nawaz, widely seen as his political heir, was given a seven-year sentence while her husband, Muhammad Safdar, a former army officer, was sentenced to a year in jail in the Avenfield apartments case.
The court ordered Sharif to pay a fine of £8 million pounds ($10.6 million) and fined Maryam £2 million pounds, while ordering the confiscation of the London flats on behalf of the Pakistan government.
Sharif and his daughter are in London, where his wife Kulsoom Nawaz is being treated for cancer and is in a coma after suffering a heart attack. Hours after the verdict, Sharif told a news conference in London he will return to Pakistan and face prison as soon as he is able to have a word with his wife who is on a ventilator.
“I will continue my struggle till the people of Pakistan are not freed of the slavery imposed on them by some generals and judges,” he said. Sharif faces arrest on arrival before the polls, in which the PML-N is in a close race with Imran Khan’s Tehreeke-Insaaf party.
Judge Muhammad Bashir read out the 100-page verdict at 4.20pm after repeated delays that kept the country on edge.
Sharif requested a seven-day exemption, saying he wanted to be in court for the judgment, but his plea was dismissed. The prosecution contended Sharif and his family had failed to prove a legal source of income for purchasing the flats between 1993 and 1996.
Sharif has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and said the flats were acquired by his sons Hussain and Hasan while settling a business deal with a Qatari prince.
“Today’s verdict shows that these Avenfield apartments were purchased using corruption money,” prosecution lawyer Sardar Abbasi told reporters. Sharif would be arrested on arrival under the law.
ISLAMABAD: Since he was sworn in for a third term as prime minister in June 2013, Nawaz Sharif faced a number of challenges to himself and his government – and almost all of them from within.
Though PML-N secured a majority in the polls five years ago and his government performed well in terms of the economy and the overall security situation, there were continuous challenges to his leadership from political opponents, egged on by the security establishment.
A year in power, the government was under siege, thanks to a sit-in opposite Parliament organised by Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf and Tahirul Qadri’s Pakistan Awami Tehreek. It lasted four months and only ended after a terror attack on an army-run school in Peshawar in December 2014 that killed nearly 150 people.
By that time, relations between Sharif and the military leadership had started to deteriorate and there were suspicions the powerful army was behind the ‘dharna’ to put pressure on the Sharif government, which had tried to adopt an independent foreign policy.
While the army launched a full-fledged military operation in the tribal areas in 2015, it took the opportunity to expand its activities into other spheres as well. Then army chief Gen Raheel Sharif rescued his mentor Pervez Musharraf from court cases and had him flown out of Pakistan.
A key bone of contention between the army and the civilian government was control of foreign policy. The army did not take kindly to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Lahore and Sharif’s peace efforts with Afghanistan and Iran.