NAB, FIA yet to take action against IOs despite court orders.

Byline: Naeem Sahoutara

KARACHI -- The Federal Investigation Agency and the National Accountability Bureau have yet to come up with compliance reports regarding action initiated against their respective investigating officers, who 'deliberately spared and not implicated' a former chief of the federal anti-graft watchdog despite the court's directives, it emerged on Sunday.

The federal anti-graft watchdog had booked the chairman of the National Insurance Company Limited Ayaz Khan Niazi with its directors - Mohammad Zahoor, Syed Hur Riahi Gardezi, Zahid Hussain and Amin Qasim Dada - in a scam pertaining to the Rs490 million alleged corruption in the NICL in 2010.

The prosecution alleged that the convicts caused huge financial losses to the national exchequer by purchasing 10 acres in Deh Phihai of Karachi`s Korangi area in August 2009 at Rs90m per acre against the maximum market price of Rs20m.

Qamar Zaman Chaudhry, who was then additional secretary in the ministry of commerce and a member of the NICL's board of directors, was also booked in the reference filed in 2014. Later, he served as NAB chairman from 2014 to 2017.

In February 2018, accountability court-III judge Dr Sher Bano Karim sentenced former NICL chairman Ayaz Khan Niazi with its five directors to seven-year imprisonment in the present case.

The investigating officers of the prosecuting agencies had deliberately 'let off' an ex-NAB chairman in a corruption reference

However, the judge expressed her surprise that the investigation officers of the National Accountability Bureau and the Federal Investigation Agency had 'deliberately spared' and 'not implicated' then member of the board of directors and additional commerce secretary Qamar Zaman Chaudhry in the case.

Therefore, the judge had ordered the then director-general of the FIA and the then chairman of the NAB to take action against their IOs.

In her judgement, Ms Karim observed that an IO was expected to maintain a very high standard of integrity and had to be fair, but in the present case both the IOs of the FIA and NAB had failed to perform their responsibility.

It said the defence counsel had argued that Qamar Zaman Chaudhry, being the then additional secretary of the commerce ministry, was one of the members of the board of the NICL directors.

But the IO, while investigating the matter and preparing the investigation report, had 'maliciously excluded him (Mr Chaudhry) from the list of accused persons, whose role [is] at...