After months of being asked to furnish the court with documents of a money trail, the legal team of prime minister Nawaz Sharif agreed on Tuesday to provide the details but after a set of conditions.
First, all the documents will be WhatsApped on the Supreme Court’s official account, not e-mailed and definitely not through postal services.
Secondly, the premiere’s legal team has insisted on the inclusion of a “dekh ke delete kar dena” clause in the negotiation with the Supreme Court. The aforementioned deletion, the team specified, has to take place as soon as the accounts are seen.
“It is not as if we don’t trust Our Lordships, it is not about them,” said Akram Sheikh, the premier’s lawyer. “But sometimes, things can get on the Cloud without our knowing and sometimes, when someone wants to make a phone call and says they are out of battery in their own phones and borrows the Bench’s phone, they could see the said documents and might immediately send them to somebody.”
The prime minister has been cautious of such an eventuality ever since 1997, when he had sent an audio cassette of his singing to MQM chief Altaf Hussain for evaluation but the latter held on to it and blackmailed the premier into appointing Pervez Musharraf the army chief.
