Islamabad (LTN NEWS): The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) was found guilty by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) of receiving “prohibited funds.” On Wednesday, a donor named Beenish Faridi said he was upset by the “outrageous” verdict.
Faridi says she gave money to the party before the 2013 elections through the PTI’s official online account. In a video message, she said she saw her name on a list of foreign donors that was going around on social media.
Contrary to what was said, the PTI supporter said she was a “patriotic Pakistani” who had lived in the UK for the past 20 or 22 years.
“I am Pakistani and was born in Pakistan,” she said. “We feel Pakistan’s pain and love Pakistan.”
Faridi asked the ECP not to “declare patriotic Pakistanis as foreigners.” He also said, “We have the right to take legal action against the ECP.”
All accounts ‘legal’
In the meantime, Fawad Chaudhry, a senior leader of the PTI, explained the 16 party accounts that the election watchdog said yesterday were illegal and not declared.
At a press conference, Chaudhry said that before the elections, “subsidiary accounts were opened under the names of party leaders.” These accounts were then “declared.”
“The accounting formula is that accountants don’t double count,” he said, adding that the 16 accounts were subsidiary and that if they were included, “it would double the count.”
“Accountants don’t count the money in subsidiary accounts,” he said. “The amount that goes into the main account is what is reported.”
The results
After the verdict, it looked like the PTI was trying to put a good spin on the end of the eight-year-long case. They insisted that the verdict actually proved that they were not getting foreign money.
But Akbar Babar, who started the PTI and signed the petition, said that the PTI was “guilty as charged.”
After the ECP’s long-awaited ruling in the prohibited funding case, the National Assembly attacked the PTI with vehemence. PML-N leaders called for legal action against the PTI to give it a taste of its own medicine while singing the blues about the “injustice” done to them by the courts over “small things.”
Also, the federal cabinet had started thinking about three options, one of which was to ban the party led by Imran Khan.
