ISLAMABAD            -          The main petitioner in Foreign Funding case against the ruling party Akbar S Baber is likely to raise the case in court as he termed the Scrutiny Committee helpless in resolving the foreign funding case on merit.

While talking to The Nation, Akbar S Baber said that he had no more hope from the Committee to resolve the case, adding, that he had provided all the data and evidences to the Committee but still they were not able to find the complete facts and figures.

He stated that the case will be a game changer for Pakistan’s politics once the details about the full scale and scope of the abuse of funding laws are made public.

He added that Pakistan suffered an endemic leadership crisis and the primary reason was that political parties were neither regulated under law nor function as organisations that can provide credible leadership on a regular basis.

He said that most political parties are run as individual or family fiefdoms used to propel themselves to power at the cost of merit.

This must change if Pakistan has to come out of the perpetual leadership crisis, he said. The foreign funding case is the first serious attempt in that direction, he added.

While talking about the 23 alleged bank accounts, he said that the ruling party was yet to confirm the bank accounts provided by the State Bank to have been used in the notorious foreign funding case.

He further said that the party in the foreign funding case was the government which was the reason that they have been using the delaying tactics to avoid the accountability in this very important matter.

He said that if ECP failed to resolve the case then he had no other way but to ask the Supreme Court or High Court to interfere in the matter as it was the matter of public interest.

While answering a question, he said that the Commission was dysfunctional due to the delaying tactics of the government; adding, that it was the job of the government to make the appointments on urgent bases so that to let the Commission continue its work on many important cases.

Meanwhile, sources in ECP without being named informed The Nation that apparently the case was so far going against the ruling party as its lawyers have not been able to answer many questions raised by the Committee during and after scrutiny.

The source further said that the ruling party was reluctant to talk on the foreign funding; adding, that they had filed many petitions to keep the proceedings of the Committee secret and not to public it as they wanted to push the matter under the carpet and keep the matter away of public eyes.

However, A three-member Scrutiny Committee of the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) Chaired by Director General Law in previous meeting has asked the ruling party’s lawyers to appear before the Committee on Monday (today) in the foreign funding case against PTI.

It is pertinent to mention that the Committee has held its 50 meetings to scrutinise the data provided by the ruling party and the evidences of foreign funding by the petitioner and former one of the founding members of PTI.

But despite the meetings the Committee is unable to provide the facts and figures of the case to the Commission for further proceedings.

Akbar, a disgruntled founding member of the PTI, had filed the foreign funding case in 2014, alleging, that nearly $3 million in illegal foreign funds were collected through two offshore companies and that money was sent through illegal ‘hundi’ channels from the Middle East to the accounts of ‘PTI employees’.

He had also alleged that the foreign accounts that used to collect funds were concealed from the annual audit reports submitted to the ECP.