A departmental clerk of the University of Karachi (KU) is on the run after allegedly striking a deal worth Rs 190,000 with a scrap dealer for the sale of scrap material owned by the university and duping the dealer into paying him Rs 110,000 in advance – with the varsity management completely left out of the equation.
The scam surfaced when Muhammad Siddique, the scrap dealer, approached the KU high-ups to inquire the whereabouts of the clerk, Usman Sheikh alias Sami Sheikh, and the management, while accepting Sheikh as its employee, expressed ignorance about the whole issue.
Last year on December 26, Sheikh had called the owner of Siddiqui Traders in Ayub Goth to visit a site in KU where the scrap was dumped. The clerk had told the scrap dealer that earlier the varsity had sold the scrap to a bidder named Irfan for Rs 175,000 and asked him to take it away within 15 days after paying the agreed amount. However, Irfan failed to arrange the amount on his own and was willing to sell the material to pay off the varsity management on time.
Siddique fell for the trap and offered Rs 190,000 for the recyclable material to which Sheikh assented and hence an agreement was reached between the two with the dealer paying Rs 1,000 as token money.
After the deal was made, as part of payment towards the agreed amount, Siddique transferred Rs 89,000 on December 29, 2010, to a bank account that Sheikh claimed was the official KU account while sending Rs 20,000 to the same account later. He also assured the clerk that the remaining amount would be paid in full on delivery.
When Pakistan Today approached the scrap dealer, he said that he was convinced by another man to strike the deal, suggesting that the KU clerk was not the only one involved in the scam.
“The owner of a phone booth in Ayub Goth told me about the scrap in KU advising that it could help me gain a lot of profit. At first, I refused saying that I was a small-time dealer and could not afford to make such a big deal,” Siddique told Pakistan Today.
“The man convinced me that this deal could change my fate and I fell for it. He then took me to a shop in Dashtyar Apartments where I first met Usman Sheikh, who introduced himself as Sami Sheikh.
“Sheikh later took me to the university to show me the scrap and we struck a deal.
“The clerk told me that he would give me a KU gate-pass so that I could take away the scrap but when I called him after a few days, he did not answer his phone.”
Siddique then approached the middle-man, the public phone shop owner, who helped him in locating Sheikh and when they finally got hold of him, he was apologetic for his carelessness and promised that he would soon assist him taking out the scrap from the university.
“Then on one Sunday, the KU clerk called me and asked me to take out the scrap without giving me a gate-pass. I told him that I would not take out the scrap unless he provided me the authority pass. He told me to wait for a few more days so that he could arrange the gate-pass. After a week or so, Sheikh again called me on the phone and made the same demand, to which I refused,” Siddique said.
“Days continued to pass but the clerk did not contact me again and then one day I heard news that Sheikh was arrested by Mobina Town police for selling KU’s point buses for Rs 3 million. I have not seen or heard of him since that day.”
Siddique said that although he had approached the university with proofs of the deal, the high-ups said they had nothing to do with the deal but they acknowledged that Sheikh was a KU employee.
An official of the varsity, requesting anonymity, told Pakistan Today that Sheikh was a clerk in the Bureau of Composition, Compilation and Translation but had been suspended. “[Sheikh] was arrested for selling university’s point buses and was sent to jail. But a few days later, he was back to the campus along with his friends.”
When approached for comments, KU Purchase Officer SM Arshad said the varsity did not sale its scrap to any person and dismissed the sale documents on being faked.
When asked that the deal was signed on his department’s official documents with signatures from the department concerned, Arshad responded that the documents and stamps were forged as ‘anyone can make such documents on his own’.
On being provided with the payment receipts of university’s bank account, the purchase officer admitted that there was an official KU account in the National Bank of Pakistan inside the campus, but the account number mentioned on the receipts did not match with the official account.
— Photos By Asim Rehmani
