LAHORE: An accountability court on Thursday allowed a permanent exemption to former Punjab chief minister Pervez Elahi from appearance in a reference against him regarding kickbacks in development projects.<\/p>\n
Duty Judge Qaiser Nazir Butt announced the decision on Mr Elahi\u2019s request, granting him exemption from personal appearance due to illness.<\/p>\n
Instead, a pleader, Advocate Anwar Hussain, will appear on his behalf in the trial proceedings.<\/p>\n
During the hearing, co-accused and former principal secretary Muhammad Khan Bhatti appeared before the court.<\/p>\n
Previously, the case was being heard by presiding judge Zubair Shehzad Kayani, but due to his transfer, the duty judge conducted the proceedings.<\/p>\n
The duty judge observed that the prosecution witnesses should not be summoned until a new regular judge was appointed in the court.<\/p>\n
The hearing was adjourned to March 12.<\/p>\n
The NAB reference alleged that Muhammad Khan Bhatti, being principal secretary to the then chief minister Mr Elahi, manoeuvered the award of contracts in favour of blue-eyed contractors in connivance with other suspects including officials of government departments.<\/p>\n
It said the suspect released full payment to the contractors even before the commencement of the construction on the project only to receive kickbacks.<\/p>\n
The bureau alleged that money from the corruption committed by Mr Bhatti had been transferred into the bank accounts of Mr Elahi and his son Moonis Elahi.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
LAHORE: An accountability court on Thursday allowed a permanent exemption to former Punjab chief minister Pervez Elahi from appearance in a reference against him regarding kickbacks in development projects. Duty Judge Qaiser Nazir Butt announced the decision on Mr Elahi\u2019s request, granting him exemption from personal appearance due to illness. Instead, a pleader, Advocate Anwar […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6068,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-court-and-crime"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6067"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6067\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6069,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6067\/revisions\/6069"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}