ISLAMABAD - Pakistan Medical Commission’s (PMC) senior members have resigned or were terminated from their positions in disagreement with the top heads over awarding MDCAT conducting contract to a private firm incorporated after the advertisement deadline, The Nation learnt on Saturday.
Official sources informed The Nation that Member Information Technology Raza Shah, Member Finance Abdul Majeed have been forced to resign while the Member Examination Dr. Tahir Qazi’s contract has been terminated by the PMC as they all disagreed on awarding MDCAT conducting contract and making payments to Testing and Evaluation Service” TEPS.
Officials said that another IT official Hamza Khawaja son of Secretary Ministry of National Health Services has also resigned from the PMC.  
Lahore High Court in its order had directed the PMC to not make any payments to the private firm as the case was in the court.
The order said, “Notice. Till the next date of hearing, no further disbursement of any amount shall be made to respondents to joint venture agreement.”
Officials said that all the senior members had opposed the contract and payments on technical grounds and viewed it against the PPRA rules, however their suggestions were turned down by the top heads of the PMC.
“These members feared the contract would open financial inquiries by the investigating departments and were refusing to accept the orders,” said a senior official.
Meanwhile, the PMC on September 17 advertised the member finance and member licensing positions, the official said that member licensing is though sitting on his position, but PMC has advertised this position as well.
Officials also said that the top IT head position, directly linked with online exams, has been vacant for the last three months.
“On non-cooperation, members were asked either to resign or face termination on which two officials resigned and one was terminated,” said a senior official of the PMC.
Officials said that the removed members had disagreement over financial and mechanism adopted on taking MDCAT of thousands of students in a row.
“Nobody knows whether the TEPS software for online MDCAT was tested before launching it for students or not and that is why candidates are complaining about its technical faults also,” said the official. Responding to The Nation, the PMC president and vice president denied that any of the officials resigned or were terminated because of the TEPS agreement.
VP PMC Ali Raza said that member finance resigned because apparently, he is looking for a different position somewhere.
“Member examinations did not resign. His contract was terminated in view of his 6-month performance which was found to be well below par.  Has nothing to do with anything else,” he said.  VP PMC also said that Hamza Khawaja resigned because he has got another job somewhere and another lady from IT also has resigned as her husband is moving to Germany. 
“This is normal,” he said.
President PMC Dr. Arshad Taqi responded only about termination of member examination and said “his contract was terminated. It had nothing to do with contract with TEPS.”
He also said that the PMC media team will contact with detailed reply, however it didn’t despite the passing three days.
The Transparency International Pakistan had also declared the MDCAT contract awarded to a private firm as violation of PPRA rules and asked to cancel the test under this contract.
However, the PMC had maintained that everything was done following the rules and regulations and no violation was done.