Pakistan’s anti-corruption body on Monday arrested ousted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s son-in-law Muhammad Safdar at the Islamabad airport when he and his wife Maryam Nawaz returned from London, local daily Dawn reported.
Authorities arrested Safdar as he had failed to appear before the National Accountability Court for hearings related to the corruption charges against Nawaz Sharif’s family. Safdar was granted bail after he was produced in court later on Monday.
Maryam Nawaz, who also appeared in the anti-corruption court, said her family was being tried even though it had already been punished with Nawaz Sharif’s disqualification as the prime minister. “These trials will last till the day of judgement unless something emerges in which he [Sharif] or anyone from his family is caught,” she said.
Sharif, his two sons, his daughter and son-in-law face corruption charges after the former prime minister was named in the Panama Papers leak in 2016. Leaked documents from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca revealed that three of his children owned offshore companies and undisclosed assets.
On July 28, a five-judge bench of the court had disqualified Sharif as an MP, after which he had to step down as the prime minister. The bench had held that Sharif had failed to disapprove of a previously undeclared company in Dubai. The court had also ordered corruption charges to be filed against Sharif’s children Hussain, Hassan and Maryam Nawaz, son-in-law Mohammad Safdar, and Ishaq Dar, the finance minister.
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