PESHAWAR (The Thursday Times) — The National Accountability Bureau has widened its inquiry into the assets of the PTI’s Asad Qaiser, the former National Assembly speaker, who on Saturday called the action political vendetta and said he would fight it in the courts.
In notices issued on Friday, the bureau asked the Registrar of Firms for details of partnership firms registered in the names of 10 people. It also sought records of business partnerships, partnership deeds, business addresses, and registration details linked to Qaiser, his family members, and others connected to the inquiry, which concerns assets allegedly beyond his known sources of income.
The details were made public on Saturday by Samar Haroon Bilour, adviser on information to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Governor Faisal Karim Kundi, in a post on X.
Qaiser said in his own post on X that he had learned from media reports that NAB had opened an inquiry against him. He said he had spent 30 years of his life with the PTI, had lived with integrity, and rejected all the corruption allegations against him. The party, he said, has a zero-tolerance policy towards corruption.
He condemned the way the notice had been leaked with the names and personal details of his family members, including his minor children, and said it could harm their education, mental health, and future. NAB’s law requires information to be kept confidential at the inquiry stage, he said, and disclosing personal details in breach of that was unacceptable.
He said he regarded the action as political vendetta and would pursue every legal and judicial avenue to defend himself.
A Rs24.4m property
In a separate inquiry into corruption and assets allegedly beyond known sources of income, NAB has issued notices to nine people as witnesses in the case of Dr Amjad Ali, a former special assistant on housing to the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa chief minister.
Five of them have been asked about payments totalling Rs24.4 million for a property, numbered CLG-003, in Islamabad’s Eighteen housing society. The notices list payments of Rs10 million by Kashif Ali, Rs6 million by Waqar Ali, Rs4.9 million by Kamran Ali, Rs2 million by Ziaur Rehman, and Rs1.5 million by Imran Ali. All five have been told to appear before the investigation officer in Peshawar on November 19.
A second call-up notice in the same inquiry summons Muhammad Tariq as a witness on November 17 and asks for the complete bank account details and statements of four companies: Pioneers Residencia, Pioneers Town, Arabia Pioneers Cranes Trading and Transport, and Pioneers Construction and Real Estate Consultants. It follows an earlier notice to him on October 28. Officials of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Housing Authority have also been summoned as witnesses.
Qaiser, an MNA from Swabi, was speaker of the National Assembly from 2018 to 2022.
The notices come in the same week that Asad Mahmood, son of JUI-F chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman, skipped a second NAB summons in an inquiry into appointments at Pakistan Post.
