Bail pleas of AKD Group directors rejected

KARACHI: The Federal Anti-Corruption Court (FACC) on Tuesday rejected the bail pleas of three top officials of the AKD Group as it found no worth in the legal claims made by the applicants.

The AKD securities CEO Farid Alam and two directors, Muhammad Iqbal and Tariq Adam, had moved their applications praying the court to grant them bail. The court, after hearing the arguments, found no worth in the bail pleas and dismissed the same.

As many as 22 accused have been nominated in the interim charge-sheet submitted by the investigation officer (IO) in the corruption cases against Aqeel Karim Dhedhi (AKD) Group last week.

Top officials of the AKD Group, the Employees Old-Age Benefit Institution (EOBI) and a textile mill are accused of stock market manipulation to earn illegal gains and deliberately causing losses to the state-run pension fund. 

On January 4 the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) had raided the offices of the AKD Group and took into custody three directors on charges of multibillion rupees scam in the sale of shares to the Employees Old-Age Benefit Institution (EOBI).

The AKD Securities CEO Farid Alam along with two directors, Muhammad Iqbal and Tariq Adam, were later produced before the court that had sent them to prison on judicial remand and had directed the IO to arrest the other accused.

The IO had told the court that the other 19 accused had been settled in Lahore and Faisalabad. The court ordered arrest of all the accused and submission of final charge-sheet against the accused in the case within 14 days.

On Saturday (January 16) the IO had told the court that the AKD Group had caused loss of billions of rupees to the national exchequer by selling five lakh (500,000) shares.  The IO informed the court that out of the 22 accused, three were under detention, two were on bail and two had died. 

The court had accepted the interim charge-sheet and issued non-bailable warrants of arrest against the absconding accused and ordered their arrest and production before the court at the next hearing. 

The accused are facing charges of misappropriation of around Rs290 million, causing a great loss to the national exchequer under the EOBI shares. Accused Farid Alam, CEO of AKD Securities, Tariq Adam, Director and Head of Equity Operations, AKD Securities, and another director of the AKD Group, Muhammad Iqbal, were taken into custody by FIA during a raid on the company offices.

It may be mentioned here that the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) during the previous government had started investigating the matters of illegal construction of an up-market housing scheme, Naya Nazimabad, on valuable state land, the fraudulent property deal between the Pakistan Petroleum Limited (PPL) and the AKD Group, construction of an irregular multi-storey building, Arkadians Towers, and the Ogra corruption case against the AKD Group.

It is said that NAB had forwarded a letter No 1(315)/K/MW-II/NAB HQ/2015 directing the Bureau’s director-general in Karachi to initiate an inquiry into complaints of massive corruption against a certain businessman (Aqeel Karim Dhedhi).

According to the FIA the accused created hype in the stock market to fraudulently push up the share prices of a Faisalabad-based textile company, Amtex, far beyond its actual value before selling its shares to the EOBI.

 The trades by EOBI were made in 2010 at the time of initial public offering of Amtex. About the fact that it took so long for the authorities to take action, a senior FIA official said the whole cycle of events took place between 2009 and 2010 after which an inquiry was initiated against the accused.