LAHORE: The Lahore High Court granted bail to Maryam Nawaz Sharif, an outspoken opposition figure who was incarcerated on money laundering charges in the Chaudhry Sugar Mills case, on Monday.
Daughter of the country’s ailing former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, Maryam is widely viewed as a harsh critic of the ruling administration.
Last week, her father also got medical bail for eight weeks from another court after his blood platelets hit a dangerously low level.
“Maryam Nawaz has been granted bail on merit in the Chaudhry Sugar Mills case,” Advocate Azam Nazir Tarar, one of her lawyers, confirmed to Arab News.
A division bench of the high court, comprising Justices Ali Baqar Najafi and Sardar Ahmad Naeem, announced the verdict in the court on Monday afternoon.
Maryam Nawaz was instructed to submit her passport to address the National Accountability Bureau’s fear of her flying abroad, however.
She was also asked to furnish two surety bonds of Rs10 million each along with a separate deposit of Rs70 million.
The PML-N leadership expressed satisfaction with the court’s decision and described the case against Maryam Nawaz as politically motivated.
“It is a good day for our party. Maryam Nawaz got relief from the court and Shahid Khaqan Abbasi is shifted to a hospital for treatment,” PML-N Chairman Raja Zafarul Haq said while talking to Arab News. “The bail is on merits and a fair trial will prove her innocence.”
However, the lawyer representing the country’s anti-graft body, NAB, challenged the grounds on which the bail was granted, pointing out that the Supreme Court had already decided that an accused could only be granted bail on humanitarian grounds under extraordinary circumstances and Maryam Nawaz’s petition did not fall in that category.
NAB also feared that the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leader could abscond if released on bail.
Maryam Nawaz’s lawyer, Amjad Pervaiz, negated NAB’s arguments, claiming that the anti-corruption body had subjected the petitioner to double jeopardy and invoked the law in her case retrospectively.
He added that the PML-N leader had never been an active shareholder of the sugar mill which was supervised by her uncle and cousin after the death of her grandfather, Mian Sharif, who originally established the facility in 1991.
