By PTI
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) Vice President Maryam Nawaz on Tuesday filed a petition in the high court here for annulment of a lower court’s verdict sentencing her to one year in prison in a corruption case, claiming that the judgement was flawed.
The Accountability Court in 2018 sentenced Maryam, daughter of deposed prime minister Nawaz Sharif, in the Avenfield case dealing with properties in London allegedly purchased with corruption money.
Maryam’s husband Muhammad Safdar and Sharif were sentenced to seven and ten-year jail terms respectively.
They challenged the conviction in the Islamabad High Court (IHC), which on September 18 in the same year suspended their sentences and ordered them released on bail.
Maryam, 47, on Tuesday filed a separate petition through her lawyer with the IHC, seeking annulment of the original verdict by the accountability court, saying that the judgment was flawed.
In the petition, she said that the conviction was a “classic example of outright violations of law and political engineering hitherto unheard of in the history of Pakistan”.
However, the IHC registrar raised two objections to the plea, saying that it contained the same request as was made in the main petition already pending with the court.
The registrar’s office further observed that the accused can only provide fresh grounds in the plea after permission from the court.
However, a special bench of the IHC, comprising Justice Amir Farooq and Justice Mohsin Akhtar Kayani, will hear the plea along with the objections raised by the registrar’s office on Thursday.
Three cases were filed against Nawaz Sharif and his family by the National Accountability Bureau following a Supreme Court judgment in 2017.
Maryam and Safdar were co-accused in the Avenfiled Apartments case, while Sharif and his sons were charged in the Al Azizia Steel Mills and the Flagship cases.
While his two sons, Hassan and Hussain, living in London, were declared absconders, Sharif was sentenced to seven years imprisonment in the Al-Azizi cases and acquitted on the Flagship cases in December 2018.
Sharif, 71, has been living in London since November 2019 after the Lahore High Court granted him permission to go abroad for four weeks for medical treatment.
His passport expired in February this year.
The ruling Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf government had earlier declined a request for issuance of a new diplomatic passport to him.
