Unaccountable NAB freely uses its licence to kill

ISLAMABAD: In the absence of any institutional check and while living up to its reputation of having been always used for political victimisation, NAB continues to be used as a tool to spare one and fix another, leaving some scandalous clues but there is no one to take the Bureau to task.

If today the prime focus of the NAB is the ruling PML-N and its top leadership, in the past the Bureau’s most favourite target has been the PPP. Civilian bureaucrats, however, remain all time easy prey for the NAB.

As and when it suits the Bureau, it prematurely gets involved in naming and shaming its target -- mostly politicians -- but later it resets its attention to someone else without bothering to conclude its earlier case(s).

It initiates inquiries and investigations, shelves them when it fulfills the agenda of those controlling it and later re-opens them when again required for someone else’s political gains. Eversince its creation, this has been happening but not even single chairman of Bureau has been held accountable for keeping different inquiries and investigations alive for many years and even in cases well over a decade, and using them for political reasons.

Similarly in order to show its performance, the Bureau intermittently launches crackdowns on the alleged corrupt, make cases of alleged loot and plunder of billions and billions of rupees. However, there is no accountability mechanism to punish those who wrongly involve people in corruption cases.

While the NAB presently is enthusiastically pursuing corruption cases against Sharifs, but there is clue what has happened in dozens of NRO cases which were re-opened almost a decade back.

In 2009, the Supreme Court while undoing the NRO had re-opened all corruption cases and had directed the Bureau to bring them to the logical conclusion. However, till today though there have been some scandalous acquittals through friendly prosecution of the Bureau, hardly any NRO cases’ accused has been convicted and jailed.

Such has been the mischievous role of the Bureau that in one NRO case, the NAB had presented as prosecution witness before accountability court one of its own absconder (in another case) to the benefit of the accused.

Not only that one of its former chairman Lt Gen (R) Shahid Aziz showed the guts to admit in public how the Bureau is manipulated to drop inquiries against favourite “accused” or those who become compliant, there has been instances where the NAB is found misusing its power.

However, there is no action taken against the NAB when it is found involved in manipulating investigations, making fake cases, getting involved in friendly prosecution or for its usage as a tool for political victimisation.

Only recently without naming General (R) Musharraf, the SC in Hudaibya case had reminded the NAB of its own law which envisages 10-year jail for those who hamper or defeat any of Bureau’s investigation, and lamented that NAB did not move against those who had jeopardised Bureau’s probe.

In 2017, the last three major corruption references - Assets, Cotecna and SGS cases- against former president Asif Ali Zardari were quashed in favour of the PPP’s co-chairperson because of the non-availability of original documentary evidence, which had gone missing.

Where is the missing record? Who is responsible for this? Why no independent inquiry has been ordered into this critically important aspect? These are the questions, which remain unanswered even today.

The NAB as well as the judiciary remained unmoved in another unique scandal in the history of Pakistan’s criminal justice system - copying of judgments in different high profile corruption cases by different accountability courts.

The issue not only relates to dubious role of the NAB and the alleged serious misconduct of the judges involved but also pertains to the finality of the cases decided in favour of the influential accused in a dubious manner.

What is really surprising is that despite having been established that a serious wrong has been done, (i) the concerned judges were allowed to retire without any punishment but with full pensionery benefits, and (ii) the corruption cases which were decided scandalously were never re-tried. NAB also had avoided to go into appeal against those controversial judgments. The Bureau also did not initiate a probe against those of its officials who were involved in the scandalous friendly prosecution.

It was The News that in 2011 had unearthed the scandalous similarities and some other controversies relating to the judgements of the Rawalpindi Accountability Courts. Handed down by the Accountability Court No III of Rawalpindi in 2011, the Cotecna judgement was almost the replica of the SGS case order issued by the Accountability Court No II, Rawalpindi.

Not only both the judgements concluded the same way but surprisingly contained innumerable similar words, expressions and even paras. In the academic term, this may be considered as a perfect case of plagiarism.

Similarities apart, the two judgments on SGS case and Cotecna case were signed by two different judges of two different courts. The SGS judgment was issued by Accountability Court No II whereas the Cotecna case judgment was issued by Accountability Court No III. The trial of these cases did not involve Asif Ali Zardari, who was at that time the president and was thus enjoying constitutional immunity. Only his co-accused were tried then.

Following The News broke the story the matter was referred to the Lahore High Court. The Lahore High Court initiated an inquiry against the two accountability court judges after the LHC Inspection Team had endorsed The News September 2011 report.

The News report was referred to the Inspection Team of the LHC, which found “impressions of déjà vu” in the two judgments following which the LHC had ordered a formal inquiry against the two judges.

However, during the course of inquiry the two accountability court judges attained the age of retirement, which resulted in the closure of the inquiry. These retirements though helped the two judges avoid facing possible penalty, more importantly the controversial judgements were neither set aside for a fresh trial nor did the NAB opted to go into appeal against these controversial judgments.

The SGS case judgment was handed down on July 30, 2011, whereas the Cotecna case order was handed down on September 16, 2011. The similarities between the two judgements were surprising and unbelievable despite the fact that these two references remained separate even from the very beginning.

It is interesting to mention here that ARY Gold reference and SGS reference cases’ judgments were authored by the same judge of Accountability Court No II Rawalpindi and announced on July 30, 2011. These two judgments had exposed some strange anomalies. The most conspicuous of these was the acceptance of former secretary finance and the then executive director World Bank as prosecution witness in SGS case while the same individual was declared by the same court in the ARY Gold reference as proclaimed offender. How did both the NAB prosecution and Accountability Court judge miss this scandalous fact, remains un-probed even till today?

On Saturday, Babar Sattar in his article in The News’ op-ed pages reflected how callously the NAB ruins the repute of others. He said, “NAB arrests anyone it wishes, issues press releases regarding billions looted (accepted as self-evident truth) and releases photos showing them behind bars. And yet it has no convictions to show for the scandals it unearths.”

Then he referred to one of NAB’s recent “achievements.” Amid the hype that NAB has begun acting in earnest against the ‘big fish’, it was breaking news last month that it had arrested former secretary and chairman CDA, Imtiyaz Inayat Elahi. NAB projected it as Rs431 million corruption case. The chairman of NAB authorised that Elahi be arrested. The accountability court allowed NAB seven-day physical remand of the accused. After keeping him in NAB’s lockup for seven days for ‘investigation’ purposes, Elahi was sent to Adiala Jail. Finally in early April, the Islamabad High Court admitted him to post-arrest bail.”

Sattar added, “Those who don’t know Elahi personally or of his reputation as a civil servant and know him only through press coverage of his arrest, would be convinced that he must have made some dirty money and is now facing consequences. Now even if NAB files no reference against him or if he is proved innocent after trial, he stands convicted in the eyes of many who will never hear about the facts of his case. By arresting him and declaring to the world that he is a corrupt bureaucrat, NAB took away his liberty and dignity. Whatever happens now, this won’t be undone.”

However, according to Sattar, “The facts as revealed in the IHC’s bail order are as follows: as chairman of the CDA in 2009, Elahi ordered that the construction of a cultural centre near Zero Point be stopped. He found that the project was ill-conceived, wasn’t backed by a feasibility study and environmental impact assessment, wouldn’t be financially sustainable (as there already existed under utilised auditoriums and conference rooms in other facilities) and the CDA’s funds could be better prioritised. He ordered that the project scope be rationalised and reduced to make it financially sustainable.”

He added, “In 2014, the Auditor General highlighted the ill planning bit in the project and the Public Accounts Committee ordered that the matter be investigated. The IHC order quotes a letter from the AGPR, dated Dec 15, 2017, that states: ‘It is again emphasised that [the] matter of ill planning was to be investigated by NAB and not the stoppage of the work on the project as the core issue was conception and viability of the project…’ But NAB went ahead and arrested the bureaucrat who identified the ill planning almost ten years back and acted to try and save public funds.”

“The IHC order further notes: ‘NAB authorities conceded before the court that there is no allegation of pecuniary advantage, bribe, illegal gratification against the petitioners or causing any loss to public exchequer with motivation to favour any person or make any grant or concession to any other person as defined in Section 9 of the NAB Ordinance, 1999.’ In bail matters, courts don’t delve deep into merits of the case. But it is obvious from the order that the case against Elahi, if at all, can only be that his decision to stop work was wrong.”

Sattar concluded, “After 37 years of public service, Elahi was arrested from his home in the middle of the night, produced in a court in handcuffs, kept in NAB’s lock-up for seven days, and then sent to jail. His crime? As principal accounting officer of a development authority, he acted to stop work on a project he found ill-conceived and wasteful. But no one will know that. When anyone Googles his name, they will find that he was arrested for indulging in corruption worth millions. He will spend the rest of his life apologetically explaining that he wasn’t a dirty babu.”

What Babar Sattar has reflected in his article is just one example of how callously NAB ruins the lives of many without having being held accountable for it dubious workings. NAB Chairman Justice (R) Javed Iqbal and Bureau’s official spokesman Nawazish Ali have been repeatedly approached during the last a few days to get their version but they avoided either taking mobile calls from this correspondent or responding to SMS message.