Pakistan’s top investigative body - the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) - on Thursday raided the head office of the country’s main opposition party the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) or, PML(N), in Lahore.
Dozens of officers of the investigative body participated in the raid at the PML-N’s secretariat located in Model Town of Lahore.
The raid comes days after the FIA summoned the party’s three main leaders in a video scandal related to accountability court Judge Arshad Malik, who convicted former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in the Al-Azizia Mills corruption case.
The agency summoned three leaders, namely Senator Pervaiz Rashid, Azma Bokhar, and Attaullah Tarar at the FIA’s Lahore office to record their statements later this week.
The case is related to a video in which Judge Arshad Malik confessed that he had been “blackmailed and pressurised” by a compromising video to convict Nawaz Sharif, a former prime minister, in the Al-Azizia corruption case. Later, Islamabad's High Court removed Malik from the post.
Sharif was sentenced to seven years of rigorous imprisonment in the Al-Azizia Steel Mills graft case in 2018.
In April 2016, Germany’s Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper published materials that it claimed came from the company Mossack Fonseca, exposing the alleged involvement of a number of world leaders, including the former Pakistani prime minister, in tax haven schemes.
