Former Pakistan Prime Minister Sharif Gets Bail for Six Weeks
Bail for six weeks to enable Nawaz Sharif to seek medical treatment for a heart condition.
(Bloomberg) -- Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who is serving a seven-year jail term in a corruption case, got bail for six weeks to enable him to seek medical treatment for a heart condition.
Pakistan’s Supreme Court Chief Justice Asif Saeed Khan Khosa in his verdict in Islamabad on Tuesday barred the ex-premier from seeking his treatment overseas, Khawaja Harris, Sharif’s lawyer said on phone. Sharif had said in his appeal the government of Prime Minister Imran Khan wasn’t providing him proper medical attention in jail. Sharif’s daughter Maryam has said her father, who had an open-heart surgery in London in 2016, has been complaining of chest pains in jail.
“This is the first of many reliefs Sharif will get from the courts because he is innocent,” Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, a top leader of Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz party told reporters after the decision.
Sharif was convicted last year by an anti-graft court after the judge found that he had accumulated wealth through unknown means. He was first sentenced to jail in July in another graft case but a higher court suspended that verdict two months later and set him free.
Sharif is facing multiple graft charges emanating from the 2016 leak of the so-called Panama Papers, which showed his family used offshore accounts to buy high-end London apartments. He is also being probed on treason charges in a separate court. The South Asian nation’s Supreme Court had ordered the trial of Sharif in 2017 following a probe into his family’s finances and after disqualifying him as the premier that year.
To contact the reporters on this story: Kamran Haider in Islamabad at khaider2@bloomberg.net;Faseeh Mangi in Karachi at fmangi@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Arijit Ghosh at aghosh@bloomberg.net, Khalid Qayum
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