Embezzlement: Five including two civil servants accused of corruption

Inquiry finds officials are involved in misappropriation of Rs391m.

LAHORE:

The Anti Corruption Establishment (ACE) has registered criminal cases against two Provincial Civil Service (PCS) officers and three town administration employees and suspended them on corruption charges.

Former sub-registrars Hafiz Muhammad Ahmed and Sadaf Mairaj Butt and registry clerks Naseer Ahmed, Aurang Zaib and Muhammad Arshad are accused of embezzling Rs391. 31 million in registration fees during postings at Nishtar Town and Allama Iqbal Town.

An ACE official said these officials had gone into hiding. He said raids were underway to arrest them. He said these officials would soon be declared absconders and their names would be placed on the exist control list.

According to the first FIRs registered under Section 409/420, 109/166 of Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) and 5-2-1947 of the Prevention of Corruption Act, the suspects deposited only Rs142.48 million of the Rs381.40 million registration fees they were authorised to collect in sale, gifts, mortgage and redemption deeds from the public. They allegedly misappropriated Rs238.91 million.

In the second FIR, the officials are accused of embezzling Rs152.39 million from Rs346.89 million collected in registration fees on sale, gift, mortgage and redemption deeds.

The corruption was reported between May 2008 to August 2011 in Nishter Town and Allama Iqbal Town.

The cases were registered after an ACE inquiry found the officials guilty of embezzlement under Section 7 of the ACE Rules of 1985. The inquiry was initiated after an internal audit of town administrations’ accounts revealed misappropriation of funds.

The official record states that Ahmed joined the PCS cadre as magistrate in 1999 in basic pay scale-17 and Butt was promoted to BS-17 in 2006 from the post of tehsildar. Both officers had earlier been suspended on corruption charges in November 2011 while they were posted as district monitoring officers in Nankana Sahib and Lodhran, respectively.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 29^th, 2012.