The Election Commission of Pakistan is likely to take action against Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) leader and federal minister Hammad Azhar over “some serious discrepancies observed during scrutiny of [his declared] assets”.
The News reported that the minister did not declare his “shares in a flour mill and few other businesses in one of his declarations submitted to the ECP”.
“After he became MNA in 2018 and later became a member of the cabinet, the assets declared by him and his spouse were different from those he had declared earlier” while filing his nomination paper, the report said, adding that this prompted ECP to launch the scrutiny some two years back.
“Our [ECP’s] team found an apparent mis-declaration, serious discrepancies and deficiencies in Hammad’s declarations, and he failed to explain his position before the electoral body scrutinising his and his wife’s assets and liabilities,” the report quoted an ECP official.
Meanwhile, Hammad Azhar has refuted the content of the report and said that it “is compiled without reading my reply to ECP which easily answered all queries in May 2019”.
He said the reporter ignored his written filed in the election commission in response to the scrutiny.
About his response in 2019, the ECP official quoted by The News said that it was “unsatisfactory”.
