By Imran Nasir

ISLAMABAD (TSAT) - A local court in Pakistan on Thursday has rejected the country’s Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) plea that the agency is not interested to prosecute the Prime Minister and his son in money laundering cases, according to local media.

However, the judge of the special court in Lahore, the southeastern city of Pakistan, has ordered the Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and his son Hamza Shehbaz, who is the Chief Minister of the largest province Punjab, to appear before the court on May 14 for indictment proceedings, ARY News reported. 

The Prime Minister and his son are already on bail in the said cases. 

On Thursday, the special prosecutor Sikander Zulqarnain informed the court that FIA is not interested in the case. 

Zulgarnain said that the Director-General FIA has conveyed to him to not appear in the case as the agency is not wanted to pursue the case. 

The development came just days after the former director of FIA Mohammad Rizwan, who probed the charges against Shehbaz and his son, died of a heart attack.

Sharif and his son facing alleged money laundering of Rs 16 billion which according to FIA they transferred outside the country. 

"The investigation team has detected 28 benami accounts of the Shehbaz family through which money laundering of Rs16.3bn was committed during 2008-18. The FIA examined the money trail of 17,000 credit transactions," leading English daily Dawn cited the FIA report submitted to the court.

The amount was kept in "hidden accounts" and given to Shehbaz in a personal capacity, the report added.

Shehbaz Sharif’s elder brother and former three-time prime minister Nawaz Sharif who is currently living in London has also declared an “absconder” by the Islamabad High Court last year in the cases after he failed to appear before the court.

In November 2019, the Lahore High Court granted four-week permission to Nawaz Sharif to travel to London on medical grounds.

However, according to Sharif's family counsel, the court also had ruled that the deadline could be extended on the recommendation of doctors.

The former premier was suffering from acute immune thrombocytopenic purpura, a bleeding disorder in which the immune system destroys platelets, and he is currently in London for his treatment, according to Anadolu Agency.

In 2017, he was disqualified by the country's top court over the Panama Papers scandal, which also led to the filing of three corruption cases. Not long after, the top court also barred him from holding the leadership of his party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz.

In the first case, Sharif was sentenced in July 2018 to 10 years in prison in a corruption case by an accountability court in Islamabad, but the Islamabad High Court suspended the conviction in September 2018.

In the second case, known as Al-Azizia, in December 2018, Sharif got seven years in prison for owning assets beyond known income sources. The court suspended the prison term and granted him eight-week bail on medical grounds in October 2019.