Hudaibia Paper Mills case
Staff Reporter Islamabad
Minister for Information and Broadcasting Chaudhry Fawad Hussain Tuesday said Hudaibia Paper Mills case was a story of fraud of about Rs1,242 million, in terms of volume bigger than the Panama Papers case.
In a tweet he said the case started in the year 2000 when National Accountability Bureau (NAB) filed the reference.
Fawad said Nawaz Sharif’s two sons Hassan and Hussain Nawaz, Shahbaz Sharif and his political heir Hamza Shehbaz were also its main characters.
The minister revealed that Ishaq Dar opened fake Benami foreign currency accounts to support the Sharif family in this fraud.
When he was caught, Dar became an approver and also recorded his detailed statement to the authorities concerned, he said.
He said later Dar deviated from his statement by saying that the statement was taken under coercion.
Sharing details, Fawad said an examination of the records of Hudaibia Paper Mills revealed to the investigators of NAB Islamabad that during the period 1996 to 1997 and 1997 to 1998, Rs30.499 million and Rs612.273 million were shown as share deposit in the company documents.
The investigation teams were surprised that a company, which had a pre-investment volume of just Rs95.7 million and a gross loss of Rs809.834 million, received such huge sums of money, he said.
The NAB, therefore, issued orders to investigate the matter under the NAB Ordinance 1999, he said adding investigations had revealed that the mills management, which comprised Mian Muhammad Sharif, Shamim Akhtar, Nawaz Sharif, Shehbaz Sharif, Abbas Sharif, Maryam Safdar, Sabiha Abbas, Hussain Nawaz and Hamza Shehbaz, had a huge amount of illicit capital and were unable to disclose sources of wealth.
He said they fraudulently opened various fake foreign currency accounts using various provisions of the Protection of Economic Reforms Act of 1992 for money laundering and deposited a lot of money in those accounts.
He said when the scandal of fake accounts broke out, they decided to put the money directly into the accounts of Hudaibia Paper Mills.
