It is surprising that former elected PM, CM, ministers etc have been tried and sentenced by NAB and superior judiciary for committing gross irregularities and abuse of power, but not a single senior bureaucrat has been punished. In all these cases, alleged irregularities and financial pilferage or money laundering could not have been committed without connivance and consent of bureaucrats serving as federal or provincial secretaries of concerned departments or state regulatory agencies.
There are laws which prohibit state forest land or plots allocated for public amenity to be leased or given for any other purpose. Yet these illegalities have occurred and will continue to occur because concerned bureaucrats manage to evade accountability with help of their comrades or becoming approvers etc.
A three judge SC bench headed by Chief Justice while hearing a case related to irregularly built commercial building on land originally allotted for a public use swimming pool in F-6 CDA Islamabad remarked “why the name of former CDA chairman Kamran Lashari surfaces whenever a case of illegality came before the court”. Numerous such irregularities have occurred in CDA such as Safa Gold Mall, Centaurus, 1 Constitution Avenue, Chak Shahzad etc which has deprived national exchequer of billions which could have been generated from sale of land through public auction at prevailing market rates.
If an elected PM can be tried and punished for living beyond means, why cannot former senior bureaucrats like Shahid Rafi, Saeed Mehdi, Ahmad Sadiq, Salman Siddiq, Capt Naseer, Qamar Zaman, Kamran Rasul etc be punished for same crime? Just take case of any former Principal Secretary to PM or Chairman FBR, Secretary Finance, Secretary Petroleum etc and their assets will shock any honest person, each a case of rags to riches.
ALI MALIK,
Lahore, October 26.