Former Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his two sons did not appear before the National Accountability Bureau’s (NAB) investigation team today, which was under directives from the Supreme Court to probe into the financial wrongdoings of the family while Sharif was in power during his previous tenures.

NAB officials were not surprised that Sharif and his sons refused to appear before the investigation team. One of the officials told Newslaundry that two more notices will be issued to the family before any legal proceedings can be initiated against them for not appearing before the team.

The Sharifs have been accused of amassing wealth beyond their means which includes business establishments in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, residential flats in London and offshore companies in Britain. They have also been accused of receiving a huge amount of money “in shape of loans and gifts” from various companies.

According to an official NAB (an autonomous investigating body which probes financial corruption in government ranks) press release, a meeting of the organization’s higher ups decided to file four references in the accountability courts of Islamabad/Rawalpindi in the stipulated time period of six weeks from the date of judgement.

The references will be in relation to the flats owned by the Sharif family in London and their two steel mills in Saudi Arabia.

According to NAB, a reference related to the Avenfield House properties (flats 16, 16-A, 17 and 17-A Avenfield House, Park Lane, London) will be filed against Sharif, Maryam Sharif, Hassan and Hussain Nawaz, as well as retired Captain Mohammad Safdar.

A second reference, related to the establishment of Jeddah based Azizia Steel Company and Hill Metal Establish­ment, will be filed against Sharif, Hussain and Hassan.

The third reference will be filed against Hussain, Hassan and Maryam. “A reference will be filed relating to the companies mentioned in paragraph 9 of the Supreme Court’s judgement in the Panama [Papers] case,” the NAB press release said.

The Pakistani Supreme Court has ordered the filing of references against Sharif and his sons regarding the steel mills and one regarding 16 other companies. These are Flagship Investments, Hartstone Properties, Que Holdings, Quint Eaton Place 2, Quint Saloane, Quaint, Flagship Securities, Quint Gloucester Place, Quint Paddington, Flagship Developments, Alanna Services (BVI), Lankin SA (BVI), Chadron, Ansbacher, Coomber and Capital FZE (Dubai). These companies, it said, were mainly used for “inflow of funds into UK-based companies, which not only acquired expensive properties in UK from such funds but also revolve these funds amongst their companies of UK, KSA, UAE and Pakistan”.

NAB officials said that fresh investigations into these cases were needed to make the cases against Sharif family foolproof as the evidence produced by the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) (the original investigating team), which probed and presented the evidence against the family before the five-member-bench of the Supreme Court. Even though, Sharif was disqualified on the grounds of this, NAB does not deem the evidence sufficient enough to be presented before the Accountability court.

It was decided at the NAB meeting that “the references will be prepared on the basis of the material collected and referred by the JIT in its report and some other material [that] may be available with FIA and NAB having nexus with the assets in the below mentioned cases or which might subsequently become available including material that may become available in pursuant to the mutual legal assistance requests sent by JIT to different jurisdictions.”

It is not clear on what lines NAB will now be interrogating the members of Sharif family. However experts point out that NAB investigators will be trying to unearth the actual sources of income of the family now that “it has been apparently established that the assets they have are beyond their known sources of income”.

A senior NAB official said that they would now consult the NAB Chairman before serving any more notices to Sharif family. Experts say that most of the politicians who face NAB inquiries often contact the local courts for bail if the inquiries seem to be entering a serious phase. Many opposition politicians on Friday advised Sharifs to get bail from the local courts in case NAB authorities arrested any of the members of the family.

The meeting in which it was decided to start a probe against the Sharifs was presided over by NAB chairman, Qamar-uz-Zaman Chaudhry, who is often described by Pakistani media as a crony of the former prime minister. The Supreme Court bench that disqualified Sharif also noted this fact in its verdict that Chaudhry had been favouring the former prime minister.  However officials said that the tenure of the incumbent Chairman is about to expire in September and the probe against Sharif will take place under a new chairman.

The Sharifs, meanwhile, have decided not to appear before the NAB investigation teams before their review petition is decided by a full bench of the Supreme Court. Sharif had filed a review petition and appealed to the Chief Justice to constitute a full court bench comprising of all judges of the apex court.

Sharif had asked the court in his review petition that it should suspend his disqualification as a member of the national assembly and should also suspend the directives to NAB to file references against Sharif and his family members.

Many in the ruling party are advising the former Prime Minister to put up a defiant face in front of the NAB probing team and to the system as a whole. His party leaders are telling Sharif that he should not cooperate with the probing team this time as he and his family had cooperated with the JIT.

The majority opinion within the ruling party is that the family should boycott the NAB investigations especially in a situation where a Supreme Court judge is monitoring the probe, which, according to Sharif’s lawyer’s is against the very concept of separation of power on which “our system is standing”.

However Sharif family is taking the position that the prosecution side is inherently biased and that the role the Supreme Court judge is expected to play in building the prosecution’s case against them would make the court a part of the prosecution process and would deprive the family of right to appeal in the apex court.

More than the possible prison sentence the accountability team can impose on the Sharif family, the implications of the publicity of corruption charges over the painstakingly constructed image of Sharif as a transformed clean man (after his exile in Saudi Arabia during nine years rule of Pervez Musharraf’s military government) are immense.

A common refrain Sharif is relying on for his post-verdict political campaign is ‘There is no corruption charge against me, I have been disqualified for not taking salary from the company of my own son……..there is no evidence, there is no allegation of corruption against me”. He has been persistently making this claim over the last three weeks.

However his opponents are clear that Sharif and his family have no future in the country’s politics, “I don’t see Nawaz Sharif in politics in the coming days” said former President Asif Ali Zardari.

The Pakistani middle classes in central Punjab (the most densely populated part of the country and the most industrialised as well—where most of the jobs are located) are the most sensitive to allegations of corruption, loot and plunder of public funds by those in power. Central Punjab is the region where most of the seats of the National Assembly are located and this region has sent Sharif’s nominees to parliament since the 1990s (the only exception being 2002 parliamentary elections, which were held under the supervision of military government).

However, Imran Khan’s popularity is soaring in Central Punjab ever since he began his anti-Sharif and anti-corruption campaign in 2013. The most recent public opinion poll by Gallup suggests that Sharif’s disqualification has benefitted Khan immensely.

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