Staff Report
ISLAMABAD: Former prime minister and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) senior vice president Shahid Khaqan Abbasi on Sunday left for the United States where he would stay for two weeks.
According to sources, the PML-N leader is visiting the US to inquire about the health of his sister and brother-in-law. The federal government had recently allowed Shahid Khaqan Abbasi to go abroad. A summary was approved by the Federal Ministry of Interior under which the government removed Abbasi’s name from the Exit Control List (ECL) and allowed him to go abroad. It is pertinent here to mention that the PML-N senior vice president s name was included in the ECL on the recommendation of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB). He has been given this special permission only once to go abroad.
The National Accountability Bureau has been investigating Abbasi in a number of corruption cases.
On November 16, an Islamabad accountability court indicted Abbasi in the LNG terminal reference.
Abbasi, who served as the PM from August 1, 2017 to May 31, 2018, after the disqualification of Nawaz Sharif , has been accused of awarding the LNG Terminal-1 contract in a non-transparent way. NAB claimed that from 2013 to 2017, unexplained deposits of Rs1.4 billion and Rs1.2 billion were made to Abbasi and his son’s bank accounts.
Abbasi has denied the charges. Abbasi has been accused of illegally appointing Sheikh Imranul Haq as the managing director of PSO and Yaqoob Sattar as the deputy managing director (finance) while he was serving as the minister of petroleum and natural resources from June 7, 2013 to July 28, 2017.
