ISLAMABAD: Senate Deputy Chairperson Saleem Mandviwalla has asserted that the upper body and the National Assembly are authorised to ask any individual to appear before them irrespective of their institutional affiliation.
“I have never seen anyone refusing to appear before the Senate or the National Assembly whenever they were summoned,” Mandviwalla said, in a statement released today (Friday).
The deputy chairperson further said, “The chairperson of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) is also a civil servant, therefore, he can also be summoned by the Senate as well as the NA.”
He also said that summoning NAB personnel before the Senate was not unprecedented as several people had been called in the past. “We never had to summon the NAB chairperson before but the director-general of the bureau has been summoned before,” Mandviwalla said.
“It is not possible that the committee summons NAB chairperson and refuses to show up,” he said, adding that if the NAB chairperson refused to appear before the Senate committee, then there were other ways to deal with the situation.
A few days ago, Saleem Mandviwalla said that warrants can be issued to summon anyone before the Senate and if NAB Chairman Justice (retd) Javed Iqbal does not appear before the Senate.
He had said that Pakistan’s anti-graft watchdog has committed some blatant human rights violations, adding that the bureau “kills people and drops off their bodies at hospitals”.
