After it stirred controversy, Prime Minister’s Special Assistant on Accountability Shahzad Akbar has responded to the Broadsheet CEO’s interview, saying he had met Kaveh Moussavi in 2019 to “negotiate the award price and trying to reduce the payable amount”.
In a news report that has now been retracted, it was claimed that an unnamed individual who accompanied Shahzad Akbar to a meeting with Moussavi was “more interested in getting his cut than investigating suspects”.
The newspaper retracted the report and offered a clarification, saying the claim by Moussavi has been rejected by Akbar. It could be someone whom Moussavi met separately, it quoted Shahzad Akbar as saying. According to the PM’s aide, he never met the Broadsheet CEO in 2018, as only two meetings took place between the CEO and Akbar in 2019.
In the interview, Moussavi had claimed that a delegation visited London in 2018 to discuss with National Crime Agency money that had been frozen under an order. At that time, a meeting took place with a gentleman who had all the documents, he said, adding that gentleman asked him for commission when told about an account containing over a billion dollars.
During the interview, he also claimed that Nawaz Sharif had offered a bribe to Broadsheet for abandoning probe against his foreign assets. In the interview, he said the assets recovery firm “had flatly refused the deal offered by a person claiming himself to be a nephew of Nawaz Sharif in 2012”. APP reported Moussavi as saying that the firm refused the deal because it did not “negotiate with the crooks”.
