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Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Vice Chairman Shah Mahmood Qureshi is PTI's new parliamentary group leader in the National Assembly (NA). The former Foreign Affairs Minister replaced his party Chairman and former Prime Minister Imran Khan as leader of the party in parliament.
Khan cannot enter the National Assembly, the lower legislative house of Pakistan's bicameral parliament after his disqualification as Member of the NA (MNA). "Sources within the National Assembly (NA) secretariat said that Khan's membership had been cancelled by the competent authority from the seat that provided his entry to the House," according to Geo News. Qureshi has sent a letter to NA Speaker Raja Pervez Ashraf seeking an appointment to put across PTI's request for the acceptance of all resignations, reported Geo News. Ashraf had already written to the members, whose resignations were submitted in an identical text. They were asked to appear before the speaker individually for the verification of their resignation but none of them turned up. However, the PTI MNAs did not bother to formally reply to the communication, the report said. Recently, it was reported that the Islamabad High Court (IHC) will take up a petition on December 20, seeking the disqualification of Imran Khan as a lawmaker for "concealing" his alleged daughter's name in the nomination papers, reported Dawn. The IHC's Registrar's Office also issued a list of cases slated for hearing on December 20, with the aforementioned plea also a part of it. The petitioner Sajid Mehmood is seeking Imran Khan's disqualification on the grounds that he concealed the existence of his alleged daughter, Tyrian White, in nomination papers. He said one such piece of information is about the children who are dependent on a candidate, and in this regard, Imran had wrongly mentioned two children, "Qasim Khan and Sulaiman Khan", and had omitted the third. Mehmood contended in his plea that all candidates contesting elections for either national or provincial assemblies are required to furnish an affidavit with respect to their credentials and assets. "The respondent no. 1 [Imran Khan] has deliberately and willfully failed to declare his daughter Tyrian White in the relevant columns of the nomination papers and the affidavit appended therewith, hence he is not sagacious, righteous, honest and a man of good character in terms of Article 62 of the Constitution," read the petition, a copy of which is available with Dawn.com. (ANI)
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