PTI leader and former finance minister Shaukat Tarin on Saturday urged the government to renegotiate and seek relief from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the wake of disastrous floods, as he called it out for “leaking” the audios attributed to him regarding the programme.
Tarin’s presser was met with a scathing response from his successor Miftah Ismail later.
On Monday, two audio clips surfaced via TV channels and social media in which a man said to be Tarin can be heard guiding Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab’s finance ministers to tell the federal government and the IMF that they would not be able to commit to a provincial budget surplus in light of the recent floods that have wreaked havoc in Pakistan.
Last week, KP Finance Minister Taimur Khan Jhagra had written a letter to the Ministry of Finance conveying his administration’s inability to provide a provincial surplus this year.
The audios triggered criticism against the PTI as the ruling coalition alleged that they were nothing but a conspiracy to derail the state’s deal with the global lender. Later, Law Minister Azam Nazir Tarar said that a forensic audit of the leaks would be conducted.
At a media talk in Karachi today, the former federal minister claimed that those who leaked the tapes mere hours before the IMF board meeting were the people who “wanted to jeopardise the deal”.
“Who leaked the tapes? We did not. We didn’t make the tapes, so how would we leak them,” he said.
“So were we jeopardising the programme or were you, by leaking the audios? You could have done it on Tuesday or later on. Why did you do it just before the meeting?”
Tarin claimed that the real problem would have arrived if the IMF would have heard the tapes. “Although it wouldn’t have affected the programme because the surpluses from provinces are in the form of an MoU (memorandum of understanding).”
