ISLAMABAD: Kaveh Moussavi, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Broadsheet LLC has claimed that he had “voluntarily” identified a suspicious bank account in the United Kingdom having an amount of $1 billion but the government of Pakistan has not shown any interest in tracing it.
In an interview with BBC Urdu, Moussavi said that the government of Prime Minister Imran Khan knows whom the suspicious account belonged to. However, he stayed short of revealing the identity during the interview.
The Broadsheet CEO said that he was in talks with the government to offer his services in tracing the assets of Pakistani political figures abroad. However, he alleged that a representative of the incumbent government talked about “commission” – a term often used in the subcontinent for kickback – for himself upon identifying the bank account.
He said that if an agreement is reached, he can “hand over the evidence collected against the Sharif family to the Pakistani government.”
According to Moussavi, former president and Chief of Army Staff General (retd) Pervez Musharraf was particularly interested in tracing the overseas assets of Nawaz Sharif, Benazir Bhutto and Asif Ali Zardari so the money allegedly looted from Pakistan could be brought back.
“But we did not want to be part of any political victimisation that Musharraf was trying to do at the time. So we made it clear that we would not go only after these three personalities”, he added.
He said that an agreement was reached with the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) and the Pakistani government and he was handed over a list of 200 people, including these three figures.
As per the agreement, Moussavi said, the NAB was to provide him with the required documents on the basis of which Broadsheet was to trace the alleged corruption amount kept by these individuals abroad and also provide evidence to help bring the money back to Pakistan.
“The NAB told us that we don’t have funds. You should spend the money, trace the assets of these people, help us recover the stolen money and we will give you a 20% commission of that recovered amount,” he claimed.
Moussavi said that they were tracing down the alleged embezzled money of Nawaz Sharif and had allegedly obtained relevant evidence from several bank accounts, many of which had been frozen.
“You know the story of the necklace which was bought in Geneva, you might also know the story of the credit card used in Geneva but when Panama papers came to the fore, we got to know what we needed to know.”
The Broadsheet CEO revealed that before he could start the process of freezing the identified bank accounts, he was fraudulently removed from the task.
It is pertinent to mention here that NAB had terminated its contract with Broadsheet in 2003.
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