After the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) declared the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) guilty of receiving "prohibited funds", donor Beenish Faridi expressed her concerns over the "outrageous" verdict on Wednesday, reports The Express Tribune.
Faridi who claims to have donated funds to the party ahead of the 2013 elections into PTI's online official account, in a video message said she saw her name in a list circulating on social media, where it was included in the list of foreign donors.
Contrary to the claim, the PTI supporter said she was a "patriotic Pakistani" living in the UK for the past 20 to 22 years.
"I am a Pakistani, I was born in Pakistan [….] we feel Pakistan's pain, we love Pakistan," she said.
Urging the ECP not to "declare patriotic Pakistanis as foreigners", Faridi added that "we possess the right to legal action against the ECP."
All accounts 'legal'
Meanwhile, PTI senior leader Fawad Chaudhry offered an explanation for the 16 party accounts that the electoral watchdog's verdict termed as illegal and undeclared.
In a press conference, Chaudhry said, "subsidiary accounts were opened under party leaders' names" ahead of elections and were therefore "declared".
"The accounting formula -that accountants follow, is that they don't do double counting," he said, claiming that the 16 accounts were, in fact, subsidiary and had they been included in then, "it would double the count".
"The amount that comes into the main account is declared," he explained, "accountants don't count the amount in subsidiary accounts".
On Tuesday, the ECP had announced its ruling in the long-awaited, cliffhanger case of the PTI's prohibited funding and ruled that the party did indeed receive illegal funding while issuing a notice to the party asking why the funds should not be confiscated.
After the verdict, the PTI had appeared to be putting a positive spin on the conclusion of the eight-year-old case, insisting the verdict actually proved its own stance that it was not being doled out foreign funds.
According to The News, former Minister for Planning Asad Umar on Tuesday said that the Election Commission of Pakistan violated the Supreme Court's verdict because the commission mentioned PTI Chief Imran Khan's false affidavit.
"The Political Parties Act 2002 mentions a certificate and not an affidavit," he said.
The politician's comments came after ECP's rule that the PTI received foreign funds from 34 individuals and 351 businesses. The donations were sent from America, Australia, Canada, and the UAE.
Additionally, ECP shared that the party received funds from an American businessman and issued a show-cause notice to the party.
Reacting to the verdict, the former minister dared ECP to upload PTI's account details on its website, along with those of PML-N and PPP.
Taking a dig at the coalition government, the PTI leader said that he wanted to offer condolences to those hoping for Khan's party to be banned and waiting for its politics to end.
"We have revealed all the accounts mentioned by the ECP," the former minister said.
Sharing his reaction to ECP's verdict, PTI leader Shah Mehmood Qureshi said that the party would challenge the commission's verdict in the court using political and legal means.
The former foreign minister said that PTI met all the criteria and submitted all the evidence to come clean.
"Today's verdict proved that there was no foreign funding case," he said.
Qureshi also spoke about PTI's objections against the election commission for its lack of impartiality.
