ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s former three-time PM Nawaz Sharif is returning to the country after Eid to voluntarily face the judicial process in all cases against him, federal minister and PML-N leader Javed Latif said on Wednesday. He also revealed that PPP had named the party’s chairperson Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari for the vacant foreign minister’s berth and that he would take the oath for the office after returning from London.
Nawaz, whose third term as PM ended in 2017 when he was forced to resign in accordance with the Supreme Court’s decision in the Panama papers case, flew to London in November 2019 to seek treatment for various ailments.
“Nawaz Sharif will be seen in Pakistan after Eid,” Latif said in a video statement a day after new PM Shehbaz Sharif‘s 37-member cabinet took the oath of office.
On the cases as pending against Nawaz, the minister said PML-N believed in the sanctity of the legal process and would accept whatever verdict the courts gave.
Farhatullah Babar, PPP’s secretary-general, said party chief Bilawal was visiting London primarily to meet Nawaz and congratulate him on the new coalition government.
A two-member bench of the Lahore high court is scheduled to take up a petition filed by PML-N, seeking the removal of Nawaz’s name from the no-fly list. His name was put on the exit control list by the erstwhile PTI-led government after he made a long-distance comeback to politics in 2020 by breaking a two-year silence to denounce the country’s powerful military and vowing to topple Imran Khan.