Shehbaz Sharif guilty of corruption worth billions of rupees, says Shahzad Akbar

ISLAMABAD: Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Accountability, Shahzad Akbar, on Thursday alleged that PML-N President Shehbaz Sharif was guilty of corruption worth billions of rupees.

Akbar was holding a press conference with federal minister Murad Saeed during which he said that in the past 10 years, Shehbaz's assets grew by 70 percent in the last 10 years.

"This came to light as a result of a NAB investigation that was conducted into Shehbaz's assets in 2015," he said. "Salman Shehbaz's assets grew by a thousand times."

Akbar said that a 'startling increase' was observed in assets owned by Hamza Shehbaz. 

He accused Shehbaz of establishing 32 fake companies with the money brought back through TT transactions.

Akbar said that three employees of Shehbaz's GMC Company were identified who were involved in running this multi-billion rupee network.

The employees were working at the CM Secretariat on different posts, he alleged. Nisar Gul, who is in NAB's custody has admitted that this was a fake company through which they laundered seven billion rupees, Akbar said. 

Akbar put forward 18 questions for the PML-N president and challenged him to respond to them. 

Earlier this week, Director General NAB Lahore Shahzad Saleem had ordered to freeze immovable properties owned by Shahbaz Sharif, his sons Hamza and Suleman and wives Nusrat and Tehmina Durrani in different cities over “offences of corruption and corrupt practices”.

The anti-corruption watchdog claimed the evidence collected so far during the investigation presented reasonable grounds to believe the accused had committed corruption offences.

Shehbaz held a presser on Tuesday in which he claimed that a 'Niazi-NAB' nexus was behind freezing his assets. He said that the nexus had failed as in the eyes of the court, he had not been declared guilty. 

The former Punjab chief minister had also slammed the government for not living up to the promises it made during the general elections. He claimed that the economy had taken a turn for the worse under the current government. 

He also labelled the prime minister a 'master of u-turns' and said that he had never seen someone who lied as much as the premier did. 

"I have never in my life seen a prime minister who lies as much as Imran Khan," he said. "Had he spent one-fourth of his time for Pakistan's development circumstances would be different today."