KARACHI: Customs Court Judge Syed Faiz Rasool Rashdi has directed the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) to issue read warrants against the absconding accused persons namely Bashir Dawood and Mariyam Dawood for their arrest from Canada through Interpol. The suspects were booked in a case of concealment of income and furnishing inaccurate particulars of their income as well as money laundering over offshore company.
During the hearing, investigation officer Muhammad Arif appeared before the court and submitted that the both suspects have not been arrested yet, therefore, he sought time for compliance of the court’s order and arrest of the both accused persons. After the hearing, the court directed FIA to initiate proceeding for issuing read warrants of the said absconding accused persons. It needs to be pertained here that the court had issued several times their bailable and non-bail-able warrants in the past.
Earlier, investigation officer had filed petition before the court for attachment of property and bank accounts under section 8 of the Anti-Money Laundering Act, 2010 in order to protect the public exchequer and also informed the court that above named accused persons are absconders, therefore, court had allowed to IO for attachment of their bank accounts as case property for 30 days.
According to the prosecution, case no 01/2016 was registered against them alleging that the accused persons owned an offshore company and were involved concealing the income of approximately Rs 9,870 million. Besides they evaded income tax of Rs 2,469 million and amount of income tax recoverable (up to tax year 2014) was Rs 2,467 million along with default surcharge and penalty to be determined at the time of payment.
Case was registered under section 111 (1) (d) (1) of the Income Tax Ordinance 2001, liable to be prosecuted under section 192 a ibid read with section 2 and 8 (2) of the AMP Act 2010.
