According to the PML-N, Suleman Shehbaz, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s fugitive son, returned to Pakistan in the early hours of Sunday after four years of self-exile in London.
His homecoming comes days after the Islamabad High Court denied the Federal Investigation Agency’s (FIA) and National Accountability Bureau’s (NAB) request for protective bail, preventing them from detaining him in connection with a reference to assets-beyond-means.
Suleman has been living in London since 2018 when the National Accountability Bureau (FIA) filed many complaints against him before the general election and he fled Pakistan after attending a few sessions.
Today, the party’s official Twitter account posted a video showing Suleman coming home and bowing to his father before hugging him. In the video, PM Shehbaz is seen decorating Suleman.
Suleman stated in a statement that he was compelled to leave Pakistan for his safety after “false and manipulated lawsuits” were filed against him and his family to “enable a new political order”
He called the charges the “worst example of a political witch-hunt and political victimization” and asserted that they were “made up by the National Accountability Bureau under the former NAB chairman Javed Iqbal and the Assets Recovery Unit.”
The NAB had taken Suleman’s interests in 16 firms, totaling Rs2.0 billion, as well as money in three bank accounts, 10 marlas of agricultural property, and 209 Kanal of other lands in June 2020.
Suleman, his brother Hamza Shehbaz, and their father Shehbaz Sharif, according to the NAB, were involved in the unlawful acquisition of assets totaling Rs 3.3 billion at the time.
The investigating team “detected 28 benamidar accounts of the Shehbaz family, through which money laundering of Rs16.3bn was perpetrated between 2008 to 18,” according to the FIA report presented to the court in December 2021. The FIA looked at a money trail of 17,000 credit transactions.
Suleman had been served with arrest warrants on May 28, but the FIA informed the court that they could not be carried out since he was not at his residence and had left the country.
