A record of payments allegedly made to 19 senior-journalists of Pakistan, by the Bahria Town owner Malik Riaz has surfaced on the social networking site Twitter, Aaj News reported.
A list of 19 journalists allegedly bribed by Malik Riaz
UPDATE: Mubasher Lucman finally speaks out; resigns via YouTube.
UPDATE: Hamid Mir ready to present himself for accountability
UPDATE: Hassan Nisar says that SC has taken on too many powerful enemies and that they should have finished the job when they had the chance to.
UPDATE: Talat Hussain shreds Media-Gate issue to pieces; Mazhar Abbas questions the authenticity of the list.
UPDATE: Dr. Shahid Masood’s quirky response to Bahria Town List accusations.
UPDATE: Meher Bokhari explains the leaked footage; denies bribery allegations.
UPDATE: Kamran Khan has denied the allegations brought forward against him.
UPDATE: Nusrat Javed and Mushtaq Minhas deny bribery allegations. Nusrat claims Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) is planning a conspiracy against him.
Renowned names of various news television anchors and journalists like Dr. Shahid Masood, Najam Sethi, Kamran Khan, Nusrat Javed, Meher Bokhari, Mubasher Lucman, Hamid Mir, Javed Chaudhry, Sana Bucha, Sohail Waraich and Asma Shirazi among a few others, are present in the lists below.
An account of favors allegedly given to these journalists in shapes of money, cars and property etc is recorded in these trademarked letterheads of Bahria Town.
Up till now, almost every accused journalist has questioned the authenticity of the list below, claiming its a fake document.
‘Journalists given gifts from secret funds’
Awesome;4185845]A couple of things...
1. What is the Reliability of this information? I see nice round numbers, which makes me think its made up. Facebook No 2 Noora isn't exactly reliable...
2. For what purpose was this money given?
But I will say Pakistan has crazy money. I have worked for a government owned entity and the higher ups would keep giving themselves bonuses just about that much and when it came to increasing our salaries... "Yaar economy ka bohot bura haal hai"... There has to be proper regulation of how money is distributed in these companies.
ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court was astonished to learn on Wednesday that the federal information ministry had distributed gifts worth millions from its secret funds among a few journalists during the year 2011-12.
“Were these gifts worth millions distributed among the journalists due to some national security issue?” asked a two-judge Supreme Court bench comprising Justice Jawwad S. Khwaja and Justice Khilji Arif Hussain.
The bench was hearing a set of petitions regarding media accountability initiated on the behest of some television anchors.
Claiming privilege, the information ministry submitted a report on secret funds before the court suggesting that the federal government had allocated Rs84.6 million under the head of Special Publicity Fund during 2011-12.
But the court directed the ministry to furnish a concise statement by Thursday along with relevant legal provisions on the basis of which the ministry had been claiming privilege on the report. It asked why the government was claiming confidentiality over allocated funds which had been collected from the people.
The government is reluctant to give details on the distribution of the money, even though article 19-A (freedom to information) has been inserted in the constitution through the 18th amendment, Justice Khwaja observed, adding that one of the objectives of the proceedings was to know where the public money was being spent.
Advocate Raja Amir Abbas, representing the information ministry, argued that the ministry had hired the services of columnists and writers outside the country to safeguard the national interest by utilising secret funds. Use of special publicity fund had been approved by the parliament, he explained.
http://dawn.com/2013/04/11/journalists-given-gifts-from-secret-funds/
