Sharif, daughter Maryam to return to Pak on July 13; will appeal against court verdict

Nawaz Sharif's daughter Maryam on Saturday said she and her father would return to Pakistan before the expiry of the 10-day deadline given by an anti-graft court to file an appeal against their sentence in a corruption case.

The Islamabad Accountability Court on July 6 had sentenced 68-year-old Sharif to 10 years in jail for owning assets beyond income and one year for not cooperating with the anti-corruption authority, the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) in one of the three corruption cases against him in the Panama Papers scandal.

Maryam, considered to be Sharif's political heir, was given seven years for abetment, and one year for non-cooperation with the NAB.

When reporters in London on Saturday asked Maryam whether she had been informed by her lawyers that they need to surrender themselves within 10 days to get any sort of relief, she said: "We will go back before that (10 days) anyway." She was talking to reporters regarding the Sharifs' conviction in Avenfield properties case.

She also claimed that the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) is aware that the Avenfield properties cannot be confiscated since no law had been broken in Britain, Dawn reported.

She said that even then if the authorities in Britain are moved, it would work in the Sharifs' favour as investigations would make things clear.

Earlier, on July 6, Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif announced he was returning to Pakistan following the the 10-year prison sentence handed to him by the accountability court, saying he has been punished because he tried to turn the course of the country's 70-year history.

The three-time Premier said that if the punishment for "demanding respect for vote is jail, I am coming to face it", adding that he will "not be a slave to those who violate their oath and the Constitution of Pakistan".

"I promise that I will continue this struggle until Pakistanis are not free of the chains that they are kept in for saying the truth," he said.

He expressed his reservations over the accountability court's decision. "No pleas filed by me in court were approved, most of them were rejected, this is unfortunate because that doesn't happen in most cases."

Sharif had already said that he would return to Pakistan once his wife, Begum Kulsoom, who is on ventilator support in a London hospital regains consciousness.

Sharif said that he has been sentenced to jail because he tried to free the people of Pakistan from the slavery imposed on them by some generals and judges and vowed to continue his political struggle from behind the bars.

Meanwhile, the PML-N fielded Malik Irfan Shafi Khokhar in PP-173 and Ali Pervaiz from NA-127 to contest the 2018 elections in place of Maryam after her conviction led to her disqualification.

Ali is son of PML-N Lahore president and former MNA Pervaiz Malik. Ali had filed nomination papers in this constituency as a covering candidate and had not withdrawn them.

A senior PML-N leader said that since the court had barred Maryam from contesting election for 10 years, the party had to award tickets to other candidates in her constituencies.

"Maryam can only contest the election if the High Court suspends the accountability verdict. She can file an appeal in the court within 10 days of the verdict. So, we have to field Maryam's replacement as the legal process may take quite some time," he said.

Most Pakistani media groups remain critical about the conviction of Sharif and Maryam, saying the extremist and sectarian religious parties, that are rapidly mainstreaming with official encouragement, may benefit from this judgment.

"The wild cards and possible benefactors of the verdict could be the slew of extremist and sectarian religious parties (a reference to emerging Tareek Labbaik Pakistan and Hafiz Saeed's Milli Muslim League) that are rapidly mainstreaming with official encouragement. They are not about to gain power, but they are shifting the body politic even further to the right and eroding the politics of conservative moderation as exemplified by the PML-N," The Express Tribune said in its editorial.

Dawn said, "For Pakistan, there is a double disappointment. Notwithstanding all the dubious legal manoeuvres against Sharif, his family and the PML-N in recent times, the Sharif family ought to have explained in a forthright and credible way the source of the family's vast wealth. Such an explanation may not have changed the course of the law against the Sharifs, but it could have set a welcome and much-needed political precedent of transparency and self-accountability." The NAB had filed the case, along with two others, on the Supreme Court's directives in the landmark Panama Papers case verdict last year which disqualified Sharif, the three-time Prime Minister.

With agency inputs