LONDON, 13 June 2005 — The governor of Sindh province in Pakistan collected 1,000 pounds ($1,800) a month in income support, plus other benefits, from Britain’s social security system for 10 months after he was named to his official post, the Sunday Telegraph newspaper reported.
In a dispatch from Pakistan’s biggest city Karachi, the weekly paper said that Ishrat-ul-Ebad Khan, a doctor by training, “lives in a mansion in the state capital while being waited upon by servants and chauffered in Mercedes limousines.”
Back in London, however, Khan continued to receive 1,000 pounds a month in income support, from the time he was appointed governor in December 2002 until October the following year, the newspaper said.
In addition, it said, he received taxpayers’ money to cover the 1,057 pound monthly rent on his semi-detached home in northwest London.
His wife meanwhile got benefits for having been diagnosed with a stress disorder, enabling Khan to claim payments as her care-giver, it said.
Khan had come to Britain in 1992 as an asylum seeker, The Sunday Telegraph said. Seven years later he was awarded refugee status, enabling him to tap into a range of social security benefits.
He returned to Pakistan, however, to be appointed governor of Sindh in December 2002 by President Pervez Musharraf, who had assumed the office of head of state the year before after taking power in 1999 in a bloodless coup.
Confronted by The Sunday Telegraph, Khan — a one-time Pakistani housing minister — said he had repaid “a few hundred pounds” and that he was keen for any outstanding money to be reimbursed.
“If anything has been done, even inadvertently, I would very much like to rectify it,” he was quoted as saying.
Andrew Dinson, a member of Parliament for Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Labour Party, whose Hendon constituency includes Khan’s house in London, called for an immediate inquiry.
“I would be very surprised if the rules allowed this,” he was quoted as saying.
