NAB chief says to control corruption with iron hands

• Qamar reviews progress on previous decisions

NAB Chairman Qamar Zaman Chaudhry while chairing a monthly coordination meeting to review latest progress on decisions taken in the previous meeting has said that the authority intends to curb corruption with iron hands by adopting zero tolerance policy across the board for corruption-free Pakistan.

Addressing the meeting held at the NAB headquarters, he said that considering corruption as the biggest hurdle in the way of prosperous Pakistan, NAB was established as an apex anti-corruption organisation with a mandate to eradicate corruption and to recover hard earned looted money of innocent people from corrupt.

Due to NAB’s proactive national anti-corruption strategy, the authority has received about 3,43,356 complaints from individuals and private/public organisations. During this period, NAB authorised 11,581 complaint verification, 7587 inquiries, 3846 investigations, filed 2808 corruption references in respective accountability courts and overall conviction ratio is about 76 percent.

Qamar said that NAB’s prime focus was on cases of cheating public at large by fraudulent financial companies, bank frauds, willful bank loan defaults, misuse of authority and embezzlement of state funds by the government servants etc. Since NAB’s inception, one of its achievements has been the recovery of around Rs 287 billion money which was deposited in the national exchequer.

He said that the figures of complaints, inquiries and investigations are almost double as compared to the same period of 2015 to 2017. The comparative figures for the last three years are indicative of the hard work being put in by all ranks of the NAB staff in an atmosphere of renewed energy and dynamism, where fight against corruption is being taken as a national duty.

Increase in the number of complaints also reflects enhanced public trusted in the NAB. In its report, the PILDAT supports the position stated above as 42% people trusted NAB against 30% for police and 29% for government officials. The recent report of the Transparency International also rated Pakistan in the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) from 126 to 116 which is a great achievement for Pakistan.

He said that to create awareness against the bad effects of corruption among the youth, the NAB in collaboration with the Higher Education Commission (HEC) signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) and in a very short span of time established over 45,000 character building societies in universities/colleges to create awareness against corruption as youth are considered a vanguard in this fight.

NAB has target that the number of the character building societies should reach at least at 50 thousand in 2017 in order to aware students about the ill effects of corruption at an early age. Qamar said that NAB has devised the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) to rationalise the workload and timelines have been prescribed for efficient, effective and expeditious disposal of cases.