The FIA reaffirms its accusation that a relative of the former CM is involved in money laundering, but the Elahi family is refusing to cooperate with the investigation.
The FIA has stated that three relatives of former Punjab chief minister Chaudhry Parvez Elahi are not helping them with their probe into the naib qasid at the Punjab Assembly’s transfer of millions of rupees to their bank accounts.
The FIA made this claim in a report to the Lahore High Court (LHC) in response to a petition filed by Parvez’s son Rasikh Ellahi and his daughters-in-law Tahreem Ellahi and Zahra Ellahi, who asked the court to dismiss a FIR filed against them for money laundering.
According to the report, a peon working in the Punjab Assembly by the name of Qaisar Iqbal Bhatti had a criminal case filed against him on January 24 by the Punjab Anti-Corruption Establishment (ACE).
Along with the FIR and supporting documents, it referred the matter to the FIA for further investigation into possible money laundering in violation of the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2010.
That the suspected Qaiser Iqbal Bhatti was a low-wage employee of the Punjab Assembly (naib qasid) who had engaged in corrupt acts and amassed assets beyond his known source of income was sent to this agency (FIA).
According to the ACE’s assessment, Bhatti laundered the money he made from his crimes through his bank accounts. The FIA sent the petitioners and others information about Bhatti’s mysterious bank transactions.
The FIA allegedly filed a formal complaint (FIR) against the petitioners on money laundering charges later on. Ad interim bails have been set for the petitioners charged in this case.
According to the article, the FIA opened a second investigation against Bhatti after receiving a tip of suspicious transactions from the Financial Monitoring Unit (FMU).
It was later discovered that Bhatti had sent around Rs175 million from his bank account to a number of different individuals.
The bank records also showed that Bhatti had Rs811 million and 4,000 euros spread across various accounts. He donated Rs5 million to Zahra Ellahi, received Rs33.4 million from Tahreem Ellahi, and received Rs93 million from Rasikh Ellahi.
The FIA eventually sent petitioners self-explanatory call-up notices requesting their appearance before an inquiry officer with the necessary record.
The petitioners were cited for not showing up to meet with the investigator. Even after a second round of call-up notices, they failed to show up. It stated that a response had been submitted, but that it was inadequate and failed to address any of the concerns raised in the written notices.
According to the FIA’s response to the inquiry officer, the petitioners presented conflicting accounts.
One of the petitioners “accepted receiving the aforesaid sum in their bank accounts and took the plea that said cash was paid as consideration for the shares they held in M/s Argo Tractor Pvt. Ltd.
The petitioner had received the disputed sum in 2020, but the company in question had gone out of business in 2014.
They did not provide a satisfactory explanation for why they would do business with an obscure person who is not related to them. Another petitioner argued, “without proof,” that the aforementioned transactions with Bhatti were invalid since they involved the purchase of land that would never mature.
In its court filing, the FIA asked that the petitioners’ case be thrown out.
