Revamping the NAB Ordinance.

The National Accountability Bureau Ordinance 1999 (NAB Ordinance) is once again in the crosshairs. The clamour to amend the law is rife. Both the opposition as well as the government are rearing to clip the powers of the Chairman NAB and to truncate the reach of the Accountability Bureau. However, this is not the first time that an effort is being made to take the sting out of the NAB Ordinance. If the past is any guide, the bill will be consigned to one of the special committees of the Parliament. There it will be discussed and deliberated upon extensively but most probably will never see the light of day. This is precisely what happened to the previous efforts to change the NAB Ordinance.

The aim of this article is not to dwell on the motives behind the introduction of the present bill but to critically examine these amendments and to put forward certain salutary recommendations that would make the law more effective, objective and impartial.

The basic aim of the NAB Ordinance is to retrieve ill-gotten wealth in the shortest possible time. The present bill called the 'National Accountability (Amendment) Act, 2019' has been introduced by the Pakistan People's Party and seems to have the tacit support of the present government. The overarching aim of the bill is to curtail the ambit of the NAB and to reduce the draconian powers of the Chairman NAB. In my view it defeats the very objective for which the NAB Ordinance was promulgated.

The bill proposes 11 amendments in the law. The first amendment pertains to regulating the pecuniary jurisdiction of NAB. According to the amended section 5 (n), the NAB will not entertain a case if the amount involved is less than Rs. 500 million (Rs. 50 crores). Although the amendment is in line with the dicta of the superior courts of the country which basically provides that NAB should only investigate mega corruption cases, however, laying down a high pecuniary threshold will make the regional chapters of NAB i.e. NAB KPK and NAB Baluchistan redundant. If one looks at the data, there are hardly any cases being investigated by NAB KPK or NAB Baluchistan which crosses the Rs. 500 million threshold. It will be appropriate if the views of the concerned regions are obtained before the high pecuniary threshold is implemented.

The second amendment proposed by the bill in section 9 (a) (v) of the NAB ordinance is quite divisive. It upends the burden of proof. In order to prove the offence of 'assets beyond means'...