As the Supreme Court resumed hearing the Panamagate case on Monday, the Sharif family submitted its objections to the report prepared by a joint investigation team (JIT) that probed its financial history and claims to have found glaring discrepancies in the family's sources of income and their actual wealth.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's lawyer Khawaja Haris, in the objections, dismissed the JIT report as "eyewash" based on "mala fide" intentions.
"The entire investigation was a farce and an eyewash and was undertaken with a predisposed mind to malign and implicate the respondents in some wrongdoing or the other," the objections said.
A copy of the document detailing the objections, obtained by DawnNews, says that the JIT did not share its evidence with the defendants while recording their statements, therefore depriving them of a chance to "explain their position", which it termed a violation of their basic rights.
Another objection raised by the Sharif family is that the JIT has "sought to mislead" the court by hiring private foreign firms to help collect evidence — through what the JIT described as Mutual Legal Assistance requests — in violation of the National Accountability Ordinance of 1999, rendering them "inadmissible" as evidence.
"JIT members exceeded their jurisdiction and authority conferred by law in obtaining documents from abroad, inter alia, by hiring private firms and thereby have not only wasted public time but also public money inrendering an incomplete, inconclusive and legally untenable and inherently defective report," the document reads.
"Documents relied upon by the JIT, especially from foreign jurisdictions, have been illegally procured, none of these documents bear the attestation in accordance with law, nor are any of these documents in original," it further states.
The statement also notes that a British litigation firm, Quist London, that was hired by the JIT to assist in the investigation belongs to Akhtar Raja, a cousin of JIT head Wajid Zia, which it claims "is illegal and unsupported by the law".
In light of these points, the statement says, "none of these documents can be relied upon, nor can their contents be considered to form the basis of any averse finding against any of the Respondents".
The objection statement goes on to claim that two members of the JIT had ties to political parties ─ Bilal Rasool to the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf, and Amir Aziz to the PML-Q.
It says that JIT members' claim that they are being threatened is also an attempt to influence the court's decision.
It concludes that the findings of the report and evidence collected by the JIT should be discarded and all cases against the premier should be dismissed.
