Corruption mother of all crimes: NAB chairman

ISLAMABAD: National Accountability Bureau (NAB) Chairman Javed Iqbal on Sunday said that corruption is the mother of all crimes and would be dealt with an iron hand.

He said that a monitoring system has been put in place to monitor the performance of NAB officers on regular basis as NAB strongly believes in self-accountability. He directed all DGs of NAB to proceed against proclaimed offenders and absconders so that they should be brought to justice as per law, said a press release issued here.

Javed Iqbal said that NAB’s main focus is on mega corruption cases, misuse of authority, money laundering and embezzlement of state funds, cases of cheating public, assets from unknown sources of income, housing societies/cooperative societies, bank frauds, willful bank loan defaults, etc.

Since inception, NAB’s major achievement is recovery of Rs297 billion of ill-gotten money from the corrupt elements which was deposited in the national exchequer, the chairman said. He said NAB had established its first state of the art forensic science lab in Rawalpindi, which has facilities of digital forensics, questioned documents and fingerprint analysis. He said that NAB has introduced Combined Investigation Team (CIT) system in order to benefit from the collective wisdom of senior supervisory officers.

“This is not only lending quality to the work but also ensuring that no single individual can influence the official proceedings of NAB,” he added. He said that NAB on bilateral cooperation, has signed an MoU with China to oversee the CPEC projects undertaken in Pakistan and cooperation in the fields of anti-corruption.

He said that NAB during the last one year, approved filing of 440 corruption references after collecting concrete evidence as per law, apprehended 503 accused persons under its enforcement policy.

NAB received 44,315 complaints during last year. NAB after careful scrutiny of complaints authorised 1,713 complaint verifications, 877 inquiries and 227 investigations besides recovering more than Rs2,600 million which were all deposited in the national exchequer, he said. -