The joint investigation team which looked into Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s family assets in London following the the Panama Papers leak scandal has recommended reopening of 15 cases against the embattled leader, a media report said on Sunday.
The high-profile scandal is about alleged money laundering by Sharif in 1990s, when he twice served as prime minister, to purchase assets in London. The assets surfaced when Panama Papers leak last year revealed that they were managed through offshore companies owned by Sharif’s children.
The six-member JIT which probed the issue submitted its final report to the Supreme Court on July 10. It said the lifestyle of Sharif and his children were beyond their known sources of income, and recommended filing of a new corruption case against them.
Sharif has dismissed the report as a “bundle of baseless allegations”.
According to the report in Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper, the JIT has asked the court to reopen 15 old cases, including five cases decided by the Lahore High Court, eight investigations and two inquiries against the prime minister.
Of these 15 cases, three were filed during the 1994 and 2011 tenures of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and 12 were prepared during the tenure of Pervez Musharraf, who toppled Sharif’s government in October 1999 in a military coup.
The case relating to the Sharif family’s four London apartments was also among the eight investigations started by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) in December 1999.
