The Punjab government is clueless about 82 official cars under the use of officers of 20 government departments including Punjab Chief Minister Secretariat, Home Department and other VVIPs and top officers, resulting in a dent of million of rupees to the province’s treasury.
Sources talking to Pakistan Today revealed that officers belonging to 20 government departments were allotted 82 cars during the Pakistan Muslim League–Nawaz (PML-N) tenure. These cars were provided to top government officials and senior officers on the recommendation of senior government officials.
It was further revealed that several officers had allegedly deliberately hidden the cars while some of the employees allegedly sold the spare parts of the cars in other provinces while some of them fitted those parts in their own private cars.
Shockingly, spare parts of some of the recovered cars were sold part-by-part by the police officers.
In a report sent to Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif last year, it was stated that only 63 cars were missing while rest of the cars were not even mentioned in the government record.
Investigations revealed that the total number of missing cars was 97. Even after Punjab CM directed authorities concerned to recover the cars, the officers didn’t pay any heed to his instructions and the cars were neither recovered nor was any attempt made to recover them.
Punjab Inspector General Mushtaq Sukhera had been directed to recover the missing cars at the earliest and a committee had also been formed including additional IG, secretary transport and additional secretary transport. However, Punjab police made no attempts to recover these cars.
Sources further revealed that several officers including the Punjab chief secretary were provided with new cars without holding them accountable for the previous cars given them.
Sources said that no officer is held accountable for the cars given to them and if the car goes missing, a new car is provided.
Punjab police officers including Mushtaq Ahmed Siyal aka Maajha, Iqbal Hussain, Musharraf Jabeen, Nawaz Akram, Ali Mujahid and several others were involved in selling the spare parts of the official cars in other provinces, the sources alleged.
So far, 3 cars from CM Secretariat, 2 from Housing Urban Development and Engineering Department, 2 from Home Department, 4 from Environment Protection, 2 from Labour and Human Rights Department, 3 from Finance Department, 2 from Public Prosecution Department, 1 from Local Government, 1 from Special Education, 11 from Services and General Administration Department (S&GAD), 12 from Irrigation Department, 5 from Information and Culture Department, 11 from Industries, Commerce and Investment department, 2 from Punjab director general protocol, 9 from Agriculture Department, 1 from Punjab Public Service Commission, 4 from Livestock and Dairy Development Department and more from some other departments have been missing.
After registering the First Information Report (FIR), police left all these cars to their fate.
According to S&GAD officials, FIRs of all the stolen cars have been registered in the name of the department and now it was police’s job to recover them. They also told that former Law Minister Rana Sanaullah was informed in a meeting about this grave situation.
