Foreign funding case: SC to hear PTI's petition against ECP on 18th

ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court will take up Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) petition against Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) in foreign funding case of political parities on Thursday. A two-judge bench comprising Justice Mushir Alam and Justice Yahya Afridi will hear the case.

The ECP scrutiny committee is seized with the matter and the ruling PTI has also challenged the case in Supreme Court. Akbar Sher Babar, the petitioner, had alleged that the audit into PTI accounts revealed that the ruling party had "six international bank accounts," the details of which, he said, were undisclosed.

The petitioner asked the committee to take up this matter with the diplomatic missions of the countries where these accounts were allegedly operating. The committee decided to also take up this matter in the next meeting. The PTI has already strongly denied having received foreign funding in the personal bank accounts of its employees. The PTI had already submitted the entire record of all the 40,000 overseas donors to the scrutiny committee in foreign funding case.

The record including the details of donations from overseas Pakistanis including LCC (Life Cycle Costing) account, the names, addresses, computerised national identity card numbers and contact numbers of the overseas donors, the details of related bank transactions, relevant bank statements, and receipts of relevant financial activities were submitted by the PTI to the committee, according to an ECP official.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2021