Earlier, PML-N spokesperson Marriyum Aurangzeb, termed the report “baseless” and a “propaganda campaign”.
The article, written by investigative journalist David Rose and quoting investigators and a “confidential investigation report”, claims that the money “stolen” by the PML-N president, between the 2005 earthquake and 2012, also came from the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID)-funded aid projects. “For years he was feted as a Third World poster boy by Britain’s Department for International Development, which poured more than £500 million of UK taxpayers’ money into his province in the form of aid,” says the report. “Last year, the head of DFID’s Pakistan office Joanna Rowley lauded his ‘dedication’.” “Yet, say investigators, all the time that DFID was heaping him and his government with praise and taxpayers’ cash, Shehbaz and his family were embezzling tens of millions of pounds of public money and laundering it in Britain,” writes Rose in the report. “They are convinced that some of the allegedly stolen money came from DFID-funded aid projects.”