LAHORE: The Supreme Court of Pakistan has summoned Sharif brothers, Asif Ali Zardari and other sugar mill owners to appear in person on Thursday (tomorrow) in a suo motu notice on non-payment to cane farmers and growers.
The three-judge bench, headed by Chief Justice of Pakistan Mian Saqib Nisar, and including Justice Umar Ata Bandial and Justice Sajjad Ali Shah, observed on Tuesday, “The Court finds it expedient that the owners of all the sugar mills in Pakistan must personally appear to explain and resolve the issue in hand.”
Other mill owners named in the case were Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) leader Jehangir Tareen; Chaudhry Munir, the father-in-law of Maryam Nawaz’s daughter; former Sindh Home Minister Zufiqar Mirza; Humayun Akhtar, Haroon Akhtar, Khusru Bakhtiar, and Chaudhry Zaka Ashraf.
Meanwhile, the farmers’ associations from central and southern Punjab and Sindh provinces requested the Supreme Court to appoint commissions headed by district and sessions judges to investigate why the mills owners were not paying growers.
In a petition, the farmer associations said the commission should also investigate that how much sugarcane the mills could purchase. They demanded that payments should be made to them through banks.
The farmers from Sindh informed the court that the mills in their provinces had stopped purchasing sugarcane despite the fact that tones of canes were lying in open fields.
Published in Daily Times, April 25th 2018.
