Arrests will not improve economy: Hamza Shahbaz.

ISLAMABAD: Leader of the Opposition in Punjab Assembly Hamza Shahbaz on Thursday said that the arrests and detentions by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) would not improve the poor state of economy of the country, and the masses would not get their bread and butter through such arrests.

He was speaking on the floor of the House in the Punjab Assembly, as he was brought to attend the session by a NAB team after his production order was issued by Speaker Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi in the morning. Speaking on a point of order, Hamza said that there was a dire need to learn from the past mistakes if "we want to put the country on the right track of progress".

Expressing his distrust over the NAB, he said that he was earlier accused of being involved in Rs 85 billion money laundering case by the NAB. "The NAB then claimed that the amount of money laundering was Rs 33 billion and now the NAB officials are accusing me of 180 million only," he said.

"I'll say goodbye to politics forever and will sit at home if corruption of even a single penny is proved against me," he said, adding that several cases against his family were made in the past but all were proved fabricated and biased. He claimed that an army general once told him during the dictatorship of Pervez Musharraf that all the cases against him were fabricated and made at the behest of Musharraf. "Who will return those days that I spent in imprisonment under forged allegations and who will return the life of a politician who was judicially murdered," asked Hamza in an emotional tone. "No one is ready to invest here as the country is passing through its worst economic crisis where our rupee is the most devalued currency in the whole South Asia, but Prime Minister Imran Khan was more interested in sending the leaders behind the bars rather than steering the nation out of the current economic crisis," he said.

The opposition leader also paid his gratitude to Speaker Pervaiz Elahi for issuing his production order.

Earlier, MPA Saeed Akbar Nawani, who got elected as an independent MPA for record seventh term, on a point of order strongly condemned the government while saying that it was tantamount to...