LAHORE
Bashir Memon, the former director-general of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), has claimed that former prime minister Imran Khan made his “life difficult” after he started probing Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) financier Arif Naqvi.
Memon made these revelations in an exclusive interview with a private television channel Tuesday. The former FIA chief said that Naqvi-owned Abraaj Group has a controlling stake in Karachi’s largest power utility, K-Electric (KE). He said that the utility used to delay payments to the Sui Southern Gas Corporation (SSGC) on one pretext or another.
With KE a major consumer and lack of payments causing problems for the gas utility, the latter would cut-off gas supply. In turn, KE would start shutting down power across Karachi. Memon claimed that this tactic helped create unrest in the city and prompt both, the federal and Sindh governments, to get involved.
The matter would be resolved after KE would make a partial payment and the gas supply would resume. However, all this ended up doing was increasing the payables which KE owed SSGC to around Rs87 billion. The issue finally drew the FIA’s attention and Memon launched a probe.
The former prime minister told me many times that you have destroyed Arif Naqvi, Memon said. “I told him that the person whose money is stuck should be worried and the person who is not paying the due amount should be ashamed but you are making our lives difficult.
What is our fault? We neither took anyone’s money nor we going to receive it,” the former FIA director-general said. Memon said he told the former prime minister that SSGC, which is supposed to receive money from Naqvi’s company, is a government entity while this [KE] is a private entity that owes them millions.
This, Memon claimed, only further angered Imran who instead chose to chastise the investigator. “That’s when he told me that Naqvi had financed the PTI during the elections. Now, the Election Commission’s investigation has shown that PTI received $2.1 million [from Naqvi].”
When Naqvi was arrested at Heathrow Airport, London, he gave two names and numbers, of our former prime minister and President Arif Alvi, claimed Memon. When I learnt that the Shanghai Corporation was considering the acquisition of KE, I wrote to the Security Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP) asking them to make sure if they [Abraaj Group] have mentioned these Rs87 billion as a liability in their balance sheet or who will pay this, the former FIA chief stated.
Memon said that the KE and SSGC pending payments were one of the biggest cases which he had investigated in his life. “I would have recovered the money had I been given freehand [to investigate],” he added.
