Nawaz Sharif Disqualified by Pakistan Supreme Court Over Panama Papers Case

New Delhi: Nawaz Sharif has been disqualified as the Prime Minister of Pakistan by the Supreme Court in the Panamagate verdict, throwing the nation into another political crisis. Sharif stepped down from his post soon after the verdict.

The court also ordered the National Accountability Court to start a corruption case against Sharif, his children — Hussain and Hassan — and his daughter Maryam.

A unanimous verdict by five supreme court judges disqualified Nawaz Sharif , saying that he had been dishonest to parliament and the courts and could not be deemed fit for office.

Nawaz Sharif cannot hold office or contest elections, Mubashir Zaidi of Dawn News told CNN-News18, which virtually signals his end in active politics. The only remedy left him is to file a review petition in the apex court, Zaidi said.

Courtroom No. 1 of the Supreme Court in Islamabad was where all eyes were on since Friday morning. The five-judge bench was supposed to deliver a verdict at 11.30 am Pakistan time, but the proceedings started half an hour late, according to Pakistani media.

The courtroom was filled to capacity as politicians, lawyers and journalists crowded the room to listen to the verdict. The twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi were on high alert, Pakistani media reported.

He is no more eligible to be an honest member of the parliament, and he ceases to be holding the office of prime minister," Judge Ejaz Afzal Khan said

This is the first time that a Pakistani court has disqualified a Prime Minister on corruption charges and as such, it throws the nation of 200 million and its politics into uncharted territory.

The question now is who will become the next Prime Minister. No Pakistani premier has ever completed a 5-year term since the founding of the country in 1947.

The apex court also disqualified Finance Minister Ishaq Dar and Captain (retd) Safdar, the husband of Nawaz Sharif’s daughter Maryam Nawaz, according to the News International.

The verdict pertains to the Panama papers, an international cache of documents that were published in 2016 by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

Among the documents eight off-shore companies were reported to have links with Nawaz Sharif and his brother Shahbaz Sharif, the Chief Minister of Punjab, Dawn newspaper reported.

According to documents available on the ICIJ website, the prime minister's children Maryam, Hassan and Hussain “were owners or had the right to authorise transactions for several companies".

This is the third time that Nawaz Sharif has been unable to complete his term as premier. A steel tycoon-cum-politician, Sharif had served as the Pakistan's prime minister for the first time from 1990 to 1993. His second term from 1997 was ended in 1999 by Army chief Pervez Musharraf in a bloodless coup.

The scandal is about alleged money laundering by Sharif in 1990s, when he twice served as prime minister, to purchase assets in London. The assets surfaced when Panama Papers leak last year revealed that they were managed through offshore companies owned by Sharif's children. The assets include four expensive flats in London.

Sharif has been the prime minister of Pakistan for a record three times. He leads Pakistan's most powerful political family and the ruling PML-N party.

In May, the Supreme Court set up a six-member joint investigation team (JIT) to investigate the charges against Sharif and his family. The JIT submitted its report to the court on July 10.

It said the lifestyle of Sharif and his children were beyond their known sources of income, and recommended filing of a new corruption case against them.

Sharif dismissed the report as a "bundle of baseless allegations" and refused to quit, despite demands to do so from several quarters, including opposition political parties.

On July 21, the court reserved its verdict after concluding the hearing.

The six-member JIT was set up with a mandate to probe the Sharif family for allegedly failing to provide the trail of money used to buy properties in London in the 1990s.

The top court took up the case in October last year on petitions filed by Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, Awami Muslim League and Jamaat-e-Islami and reserved the verdict in February after conducting hearings on a daily basis.

The five-judge bench that issued Friday’s verdict comprised Justices Asif Saeed Khosa, Khan, Gulzar Ahmed, Sheikh Azmat Saeed and Ijazul Ahsan.

The court took up the case on November 3 last year and held 35 hearings spanning over more than 132 hours before concluding the proceedings on February 23. It had issued the 547-pages split judgement on April 20.