ISLAMABAD: National Accountability Bureau (NAB) Chairman Justice (R) Javed Iqbal said that the NAB has recovered Rs466.069 billion from corrupt elements since its inception and deposited in national exchequer.
The NAB’s prime focus is on corruption and corrupt practices i.e. money laundering, cases of cheating the public at large, bank frauds, willful bank loan defaults, misuse of authority and embezzlement of state funds etc,” he said while chairing a meeting to review overall performance of NAB at its headquarters on Thursday.
Justice Javed Iqbal said that the overall complaints in 2019 were 53,643 and processed 42,760 whereas complaints in 2018 were 48,591 and processed 41,414. “Increase in the number of complaints also reflects enhanced public trusted in the NAB,” he said.
He said NAB during 2019, processed 1,308 complaint verifications, 1,686 inquiries and 609 investigations and recovered Rs141.542 billion from corrupt elements in 2019 and NAB’s accumulative success ratio is about 68.8 percent which is an achievement in investigation of white collar crimes in the world.
The NAB chairman said that corruption is the mother of all evils and eradication of corruption and logical conclusion of mega corruption cases is the top most priority of NAB. He said NAB is the focal organisation of Pakistan under United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) as Pakistan is signatory of UNCAC.
He said that NAB’s faith is corruption free Pakistan which is in line with its national anti-corruption strategy of Awareness, Prevention and Enforcement. He said that World Economic Forum and Transparency International Pakistan, PILDAT and Mishal Pakistan have lauds NAB’s efforts to aware people about the ill effects of corruption in order to have corruption free Pakistan.
He said that detailed analysis and review of all pillars of the organisation i.e. Operations, Prosecution, Human Resource Development, Training and Research and Awareness and Prevention etc have been made in order to further improve their performance in an atmosphere of renewed energy and dynamism, where fight against corruption is being taken as a national duty.
He said that NAB has introduced a new concept of Combine Investigation Team (CIT) in order to benefit from the experience and collective wisdom of senior supervisory officers, a system of CIT comprising of director, additional director, investigation officer, legal counsel, financial and land revenue experts has been put in place besides establishing its own state of the art forensic science laboratory in NAB Rawalpindi which has facilities of digital forensics, questioned documents and fingerprint analysis.
He said that NAB is the Chairman of Saarc anti-corruption forum. NAB is considered as a role model among Saarc countries. He said that Pakistan’s Apex Anti Corruption Agency, NAB is the only Organization in the world with whom China has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to oversee projects to be undertaken under CEPC in Pakistan.
He said that signing of Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between Pakistan and China is especially significant in the backdrop of increasing economic and trade cooperation between Pakistan and China with the resolve by both the governments to work in a fair, impartial and corruption free environment in order to share their experiences to eradicate corruption.