Pakistan PM Imran Khan's ruling party splits, parliament majority at risk

A member of the party, Jahangir Tareen, recently had a fallout with Khan and is backed by 40 lawmakers of the National Assembly and provincial Punjab Assembly reports Dawn newspaper.

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s ruling party has split and a senior member has formed a breakaway group, putting the government and its thin parliamentary majority at risk.

Jahangir Tareen, who’s recently fallen out with Khan, is backed by 40 lawmakers of the federal National Assembly and provincial Punjab Assembly, Dawn newspaper reports, citing Raja Riaz, the leader of the new group. Khan’s party has 156 members out of a total 342 seats in the federal assembly and 181 of total 369 members in the largest Punjab provincial assembly.

It’s the latest round of political turmoil for Khan, who won a vote of confidence in March with 52% votes to continue as prime minister after his then finance minister Abdul Hafeez Shaikh unexpectedly lost his Senate seat in an election.

The South Asian nation is looking to boost growth economy with a newly appointed finance minister Shaukat Tarin and renegotiate terms with the International Monetary Fund for its $6 billion loan program. The minister has said the economy needs to expand by 5% next year, one percentage point higher than the IMF’s 4% projection.

Tareen, a businessman and sugar tycoon, is seen as a king-maker and is known to have wooed many politicians to join Khan’s political party, helping him win the elections that made him the prime minister in 2018. Tareen is currently being investigated in a corruption case.

Foreign funding case: More undeclared accounts of PTI surface
 
More undeclared bank accounts of the ruling Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s (PTI) party emerged on the second day of investigation, which looked at Prime Minister Imran Khan’s financial documents.  According to the Dawn newspaper, the petitioner Akbar S Babar demanded that all original bank acounts, which have been requisitioned by the State Bank of Pakistan, be perused.  These have been kept secret by the Election Commission of Pakistan’s Scrutiny Committee. The process is set to end within 40 hours of its commencement. The EC, at the time of going to press, was yet to make a decision on Babar’s second petition.