SHC CJ seeks report on condition of Larkana hospital

The chief justice of the Sindh High Court, Justice Ahmed Ali M Sheikh, on Tuesday took notice of news reports regarding a non-functional government hospital in Mehrab Sandeelo, District Larkana and directed the district and sessions judge for Larkana to conduct an inspection and submit a report.

As per the news report, the eight-room hospital which is meant to cater to 50 villages in District Larkana does not have any doctors or paramedics.

The SHC CJ observed that such abject conditions point to possible misappropriation of government funds and such practices were denying medical facilities to the people living in nearby villages.

The chief justice directed the district and sessions judge for Larkana to immediately visit the hospital to conduct an inspection and submit a report with details regarding number of staff including doctors posted and attending the hospital, number of ambulances provided to the hospital, medicine stock and availability for patients and provision of X-ray and other medical facilities.

The chief justice directed the health secretary and regional director of the health department to submit within a week a detailed report highlighting the budgetary allocation spent over the past five years.  

Plea against NBWs 

The Sindh High Court has constituted a special bench to hear the petitions of accused involved in multi-billion corruption reference against issuance of non-bailable warrants by an accountability court.

Petitioners Iqbal Z Ahmed and others were named as co-accused in the National Accountability Bureau’s corruption reference against Dr Asim Hussain regarding award of illegal contracts to a private gas company. 

The petitioners’ counsel submitted that the accountability court had issued non-bailable warrants against them even though they were out on protective bail. He submitted that the accountability court could not issue non-bailabale warrants over non-appearance for trial court proceedings. The bench will hear the petitions on September 25.  

The petitioners – Iqbal Z Ahmed, Basharat Mirza, Zahid Bakhtiar, Khalid Rehman and Yousuf Ansari, CEO of Jamshoro Joint Venture Limited (JJVL) and ex-senior officials of Oil and Gas Development Company Limited (OGDCL) and Sui Southern Gas Company (SSGC) – had obtained pre-arrest bail in the reference.

NAB had filed a reference on March 5 last year regarding illegal award of contracts to a privately-managed gas processing company, JJVL. The investigators alleged that the private company was allowed to process gas from five fields in lower Sindh without conducting an open auction, or signing agreements and following other necessary procedures required by the law and caused a loss of Rs17.338 billion to the national exchequer.  

Workers welfare funds 

The Sindh High Court has ordered the release of Rs10 billion to the Sindh Worker Welfare Funds. The direction came on a request by the Sindh government which argued that about Rs10 billion have been withheld on petitions of various private companies that do not want to contribute to the workers welfare fund.