The Election Commission will hear the PTI foreign funding case daily to meet a 30-day deadline set by the Islamabad High Court.

The court set the deadline on Thursday for the three-member bench led by Chief Election Commissioner Sikandar Sultan Raja, with Nisar Ahmed Durrani and Shah Muhammad Jatoi.

The three-member scrutiny committee that investigated the finances submitted its report in November last year. The ECP went back to hearing the case in December.

However, the scrutiny committee looking in to the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz and Pakistan Peoples Party has yet to submit its report.

The PTI has repeatedly demanded the ECP ensure that the scrutiny panel’s reports for the PML-N and PPP are completed as soon as possible.

Last month, the ECP reconstituted the scrutiny committee to investigate the finances of PML-N and PPP in the foreign funding case.

The reconstituted four-member committee is led by ECP Law Director-General Muhammad Arshad and comprises of ECP Director General Political Finance Masood Akhtar Sherwanee, Additional Secretary Administration ECP Manzoor Akhtar Malik and Khurram Raza Qureshi from Auditor General of Pakistan.

Sherwanee also belonged to AGP and was part of the three-member scrutiny committee that probed the finances of the PTI and submitted report to the ECP in foreign funding case.

That committee was also led by DG Law ECP and also had Controller Accounts Air Force Muhammad Faheem as its member but it became dysfunctional following Sherwanee’s retirement from AGP. He has been employed in the electoral body.

In November 2014, Akbar Sher Babar, one of the founding members of PTI, moved the ECP accusing the PTI of being a foreign funded party and seeking action against it in accordance with related constitutional provisions.

This story was first published in Business Recorder on April 16, 2022.