Eradicating corruption with renewed energy: Chairman NAB

F.P. Report

ISLAMABAD: Chairman National Accountability Bureau (NAB) Justice Javed Iqbal has said that the anti graft watchdog was indeed committed to root out corruption with iron hands with renewed energy and dynamism.

Addressing NAB officers at NAB Headquarters, he said that the Father of the Nation Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah in his address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan had termed “One of the biggest curses… is corruption and bribery. That really is a poison. We must put it down with an iron hand”.   Chairman NAB said that NAB was established to eradicate corruption in a holistic and integrated manner. NAB was striving to accomplish its mission to rid the nation from corruption and corrupt practices, said a press release.    NAB’s operational methodology has set three stages for proceeding of cases including complaint verification, inquiry and investigation. NAB’s officials need to follow Anti Corruption Strategy by Adopting “NAB’s faith-Corruption free Pakistan” policy against eradication of corruption.

He said that the hard work, commitment, transparency and merit being put in by NAB officers were being appreciated by national and international reputed organizations. He directed NAB officers to double their efforts in nabbing corrupts elements and recovered from them hard earned looted money of the innocent citizen of Pakistan.

He said that to close the possibility of any single NAB official influencing the discharge of official business, the new concept of a “Combined Investigation Team” (CIT) was introduced where two investigation officers and a legal consultant, financial expert under the supervision of Additional Director/Case and concerned Director were working as a team for a fair, transparent and unbiased, inquiry/ investigations.

He said that the quality of inquiry and investigation of NAB must have further improve due to establishment of NAB’s first Forensic Science Lab (FSL) in Islamabad which has all facilities of Digital Forensics, Questioned Documents and Fingerprint Analysis which will help in lending quality and solid evidence in conduct of inquiries and investigations. NAB has devised Monitoring & Evaluation System (MES) to monitor performance of NAB and all Regional Bureaus in qualitative and quantitative term.

He said that NAB was absolutely committed to nab corrupt elements and has recovered Rs. 153 billion during 2019 and our overall conviction ratio was about 70% in Accountability Courts. NAB Ordinance 1999’s preamble emphasizes on recovery of looted money. Due to this reason, NAB has recovered Rs. 328 billion since its inception. Since its inception, NAB had adopted the Enforcement based approach in its fight against corruption. Special focus is now being given to Awareness and Prevention activities besides Enforcement to aware people about the ill effects of corruption as corruption is mother of all evils.