LAHORE – The National Accountability Bureau (NAB) Punjab is in the midst of a severe financial crisis after completely exhausting its annual financial allocation and is having to borrow hefty sums from NAB Balochistan for its everyday expenditures and employees’ salaries.
The financial crisis has come mostly because of policies adopted by the top brass of NAB Punjab who, in spite of the bureau being short of funds, have recently raised the salaries of prosecutors employed on contracts by up to 120 percent, after which even a junior prosecutor is now earning Rs 80,000 a month instead of the standard Rs 35,000.
Sources told Pakistan Today that authorities were promoting such policies on orders from the government, who wanted to abolish NAB. They said that the salaries of contractual employees had been raised but regular employees of the institute were still waiting for the restoration of utility charges and subsidy allowances, which had been temporarily stopped by the authorities in 2009 because of shortage of funds.
This had caused a decrease of Rs 1,700 to Rs 10,000 in the salaries of NAB’s regular employees. Sources said that depressed by the circumstances, many employees had begun to move to other institutions and a number of valuable employees had left NAB. After the implementation of the National Judicial Policy, a handsome raise was also given to the staff of the Lahore high Court and subordinate judiciary, but NAB’s regular staff still did not receive any increase in their salaries, said the sources.
The policies adopted by the authorities have rendered NAB practically dysfunctional. For NAB, apart from the official budget, a major source of income are service charges that are received out of the amount paid by an accused person in the shape of fine, plea bargain or volunteer return of embezzled sums. In the past, NAB has recovered billions of rupees from people accused of fraud and financial irregularities.
The largest sum the bureau has ever recovered is $7.5 million that was paid by Admiral Mansoor-ul-Haq in a plea-bargain, but the policies adopted by NAB authorities recently have cut down recoveries through plea-bargains from the accused nominated in several references by 90 percent. Another plea bargain agreement that can fulfil NAB Punjab’s financial requirements for the next several years has been offered by Syed Sibtul Hassan Shah Gillani, alias “Double Shah”.
He had offered to pay NAB over Rs 6 billion but the NAB authorities failed to capitalise on the offer. From 1999 till the end of 2007, 46 accused had entered into plea-bargain agreements with NAB Lahore, but since 2007 only five such agreements have been made because of the policies of the officials.
