NAB Punjab DG impeding prosecutors’ contract extensions

The National Accountability Bureau (NAB) Punjab director general (DG) is allegedly delaying the extension of the contracts of NAB prosecutors owing to his vested interests, as he is paying attention only to the appointment of his own recommended prosecutors instead of extending the contracts of the current experienced and competent ones, Pakistan Today learnt on Monday.
Khurshid Anwar Bhinder, the accountability watchdog’s Punjab chief, has retained the files of two prosecutors in his office whose contracts expired on Monday and they have not been informed whether their contracts are being extended or not, sources said. Earlier, the prosecution branch of Lahore had prepared an evaluation report about the performance of the prosecutors and had sent it to the DPGA for his approval, who wrote his comments and remarks on it and forwarded it to the director general. The DG, however, wrote “no comments” on the report and retained it in his office instead of forwarding it to Islamabad for the final opinion. The contracts of Syed Abid Hussain Rizvi and Tariq Ameer Qureshi, the two prosecutors, had expired on Monday. They are among the three prosecutors who were appointed through the complete legal channel after the publication of vacancies in newspapers and were re-appointed after their contracts had expired in 2008. Sources said that instead of forwarding the case of the prosecutors for extension, the NAB Lahore chief was allegedly going to present a list of candidates for prosecutors based on his own liking to Islamabad.
After the expiry of Rizvi and Qureshi’s contracts, only three persecutors, Zair Sikandar Khan Barki, Mehr Muhammad Ishaq and Sultan Mahmood, are left in Lahore’s accountability courts. Their contracts will expire on December 1, December 9 and February 28 respectively. If a decision on the extension in the contracts is not taken immediately, the accountability process in Punjab can suffer a serious setback that will further exacerbate the bureau’s woes that had developed in the long absence of a chairman.