As the finance minister appeared in court, the bench rejected junior lawyer Kauseen Faisal Mufti's application for the defendant's exemption from future hearings.
In the application, Mufti said that Dar wished to be exempted from court in order to be able to concentrate of his duties as the country's fiance minister.
Once the court rejected the appeal the junior lawyer said Harris would refile an appeal for the finance minister's exemption from the proceedings once he appears in court this afternoon.
Once the hearing continues the prosecution will present Masood Ghani, the Manager of Habib Bank Islamabad as it's fourth witness in the case.
The accountability court had indicted Dar last month in a reference pertaining to his owning “assets beyond his known sources of income”.
Previous hearings
During an eight-hour trial, held on October 12, NAB had presented Al-Baraka Bank Senior Vice-President Tariq Javed and Shahid Aziz of the National Investment Trust (NIT) who testified against the finance minister.
Dar's counsel continued to point out discrepancies in the prosecution’s evidence and, during the cross-examination of a prosecution witness, found certain documents to have been tampered with.
During the cross examination, defence counsel Khawaja Haris drew the court’s attention to an original document regarding Dar’s investments which was produced by the witness, saying that it was different from the copy submitted to the court.
It emerged that the form carried stamps of two cities — Lahore and Islamabad — and seemed to have been tampered with.
When confronted with this detail, the witness said that while NIT kept the original form, a carbon copy was sent to Karachi, adding that the photocopy that was submitted to the court was sent to him by the Karachi office.
However, the court noted that the original and photocopy were different.
In his statement, the witness informed the court that after receiving the original, as well as photocopies of the documents from Karachi, he sent the same to the Lahore NAB.
“If a carbon copy is made from the original document, then why is the photocopy different from the original?” asked Khawaja Haris.
The witness, however, said it was routine practice to make corrections in such documents.
The witness told the court that Dar invested Rs120 million in NIT, but withdrew the amount in January 2017.
During cross-examination, the witness confirmed that the investment was made in accordance with the company’s rules and the amount was refunded to Dar, along with the profit, after deducting government taxes.
The second witness also recorded his also handed over documents regarding nine companies of the Hajvery Group, associated with Dar.
During cross-questioning, Javed admitted that he was neither the author, nor the custodian of most of the evidence he had produced before the court.
However, he claimed that the bank management had allowed him to trace the record of Dar and the companies associated with him, but he could not produce any written orders in this regard.
He said that the management intimated him via email that he could produce the record at the next date of proceeding.
The accountability judge then put off further proceedings until Oct 16. The court also summoned another witness, Masoodul Ghani of the Habib Bank Limited, on the same date.
On October 4, Dar’s lawyer had raised questions regarding the relevance of the first prosecution witness and objected to the admissibility of evidence procured from the witness by NAB.
The counsel made the objections after Accountability Judge Mohammad Bashir recorded the statement of Bank Al-Falah Manager Operations Ishtiaq Ali, in whose branch Dar held a personal and company account until 2006.
NAB Special Prosecutor Imran Shafiq produced the witness and exhibited the relevant documents in the assets reference against Dar, which defense counsel Khawaja Haris described as “completely irrelevant”.
Assets beyond known income
On July 28, a five-member Supreme Court bench had ordered NAB to file three references against former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and one against Dar, on petitions filed by Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf’s Imran Khan, Jamaat-i-Islami’s Sirajul Haq and Awami Muslim League’s Sheikh Rashid Ahmed.
In its reference against the finance minister, NAB has alleged that “the accused has acquired assets and pecuniary interests/resources in his own name and/or in the name of his dependants of an approximate amount of Rs831.678 million (approx)”.
The reference alleged that the assets were “disproportionate to his known sources of income for which he could not reasonably account for”.
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