Pak minister says those defending Nawaz Sharif should be ashamed of themselves

Pakistan's Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry said on Monday that the "real face of Nawaz Sharif has been unmasked today", hours after an accountability court sentenced the three-time former prime minister to seven years in jail in the Al-Azizia Steel Mills corruption case.

Addressing a press conference on Monday evening, Chaudhry said that the people who are still defending Sharif should be ashamed of themselves because the money involved in the scam belongs to the people of Pakistan, Dawn reported.

"As per the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) law, if a person is unable to justify the sources of his earnings then that amount is considered as corruption," Chaudhry, a senior leader of Prime Minister Imran Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf party, was quoted as saying by the paper.

Chaudhry added that the 68-year-old PML-N leader was unable to provide money trail for his assets, therefore, he was sentenced to seven years in prison.

In his verdict, Accountability Court II Judge Muhammad Arshad Malik Monday said there was concrete evidence against the former premier in the Al-Azizia case, and that he was unable to give the trail of the money used to set up the Al-Azizia steel mills in Saudi Arabia by his family in 2001 and later on the Hill Metal Establishment also in Saudi Arabia.

Commenting on the verdict, Sharif's daughter Maryam Nawaz said that the ruling against her father in the Al-Azizia case was "blind revenge's last hiccup".

In a series of tweets in Urdu, Maryam termed the verdict an indictment of "the government's weakness", reminding them that "governments are not run by targeting opponents."