Mohsin Naqvi has responded to wife’s name’s inclusion in Dubai leaks report.
Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said Tuesday that the property purchased in Dubai under his wife’s name was declared with relevant authorities after an explosive report revealed that several prominent Pakistanis owned assets in the Gulf emirate.
“The property bought in my wife’s name has been declared. The property was also shown in the tax returns filed [with relevant authorities],” Naqvi, who also served as the caretaker chief minister of Punjab, said in a statement.
Dubai leaks report
Recently, a global joint investigative journalism project, ‘Dubai Unlocked’, has revealed the ownership of properties of the global elite in Dubai. The list includes political figures, globally sanctioned individuals, alleged money launderers and criminals. Pakistanis have also been identified on the list and their combined value has been estimated at around $11 billion.
The project — ‘Dubai Unlocked’ — is based on data that provides a detailed overview of hundreds of thousands of properties in Dubai and information about their ownership or usage, largely from 2020 and 2022. Properties purchased in the name of companies and those that are in commercial areas are not part of this analysis.
The data was obtained by the Centre for Advanced Defence Studies (C4ADS), a non-profit organisation based in Washington, DC. It was then shared with Norwegian financial outlet E24 and the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which coordinated a six-month investigative project with reporters from 74 media outlets in 58 countries, uncovering scores of convicted criminals, fugitives, and political figures who have recently owned at least one piece of real estate in Dubai. The News and Dawn were partners from Pakistan.
Among the Pakistanis listed in the Property Leaks are President Asif Ali Zardari’s three children, Hussain Nawaz Sharif, Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi’s wife, Sharjeel Memon and family members, Senator Faisal Vawda, Farah Gogi, Sher Afzal Marwat, four MNAs and half a dozen MPAs from the Sindh and Balochistan assemblies. The Pakistani list also features the late Gen Pervez Musharraf, former prime minister Shaukat Aziz and more than a dozen retired generals as well as a police chief, an ambassador and a scientist – all of whom owned properties either directly or through their spouses and children.
ان کے بچے، ان کے بچوں کے بچے اور پھر ان کے بچوں کے بچے ملک کو لوٹ کر جائدادیں بناتے رہیں گے اور عوام آٹے اور بلوں کی لائنوں میں لگی رہے گی، جیسا کہ پچھتر سالوں سے لگی ہوئی ہے، یہ غلامی نہیں تو اور کیا ہے؟#DubaiLeaks pic.twitter.com/sN35G6ZdLd
— PTI (@PTIofficial) May 14, 2024
In 2014, President Asif Ali Zardari had received foreign property as a gift. By the time he declared it in 2018, he had gifted it to someone. In 2014, a business tycoon co-accused with Zardari in the fake accounts case, Abdul Ghani Majid, declared in his wealth statement that he had granted a gift of Rs329m but neither mentioned its type nor the recipient. The JIT however recovered a memo about the purchase in March 2014 of a penthouse in Dubai. The Property Leaks data has now unveiled that Ghani had gifted this property to Zardari who gifted it to his daughter.
Chief Financial Officer of Omni Group Aslam Masood along with his wife is also shown as a listed owner of several properties in the data. The News checked the value of one of them and found out that it was purchased at AED1,060,626 (Rs80m) in March 2013.
Sohrab Dinshaw is also a property owner in Dubai. A villa he purchased in 2015 carried a purchase price of AED 1271888 (Rs 96m).
