Whitewashing records: PPP leaders refuse to hold their own to account

PAC chief declines to take action against illegal hires

ISLAMABAD: In an exercise of blatant partisanship, Leader of the Opposition Khursheed Shah on Thursday took advantage of his current position as chairman of the Public Accounts Committee of parliament to legitimise several unlawful actions taken during the Zardari administration, when his party, the PPP, was in power, including the illegal hiring of nearly 7,000 people as well as illegal rental power agreements that cost the exchequer Rs86 billion.

Shah condoned the unlawful recruitments of 6,984 people into the Faisalabad, Gujranwala, Islamabad, Lahore and Multan power distribution companies in 2008 and 2009, soon after the PPP-led coalition took office. The Director General of Audit pleaded to the PAC that the Lahore High Court has ordered the case to be referred to the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) but the PAC chairman did not listen him. “We cannot snatch the livelihoods of the people,” said Shah.



The PAC also declined to take any action against any officials or former cabinet members over Auditor General of Pakistan’s (AGP) report that several government rules and laws were broken in granting the Rs86 billion contracts to rental power plants in fiscal 2010.

The AGP’s office presented as many as 15 audit objections over the rental power contracts signed by state-owned power companies. In all, ten RPPs were granted government contracts which the AGP said were in clear violation of the Public Procurement Regulatory Authority Rules, decisions of the Economic Coordination Committee (ECC) of the Cabinet, and violations of National Electric Power Regulatory Authority’s (Nepra) instructions. In addition, several of the companies violated the contract terms they negotiated with the government.

The PAC, however, decided to take no action against the officials and ministers responsible for the RPP fiasco, with Shah arguing that the PAC should take no action until the Supreme Court renders its decision about the RPP contracts, even though the apex court has already rendered its verdict. Shah’s lack of action prompted Sheikh Rasheed Ahmad, a member of the PAC take a jibe at the chairman.

“For Khursheed Shah it is a day of pending the decisions,” said Rashid, implying that the chairman had been waiting for the opportunity to whitewash his party’s record in office.

The Supreme Court has already declared the RPP contracts illegal and has directed NAB to recover the advances paid by the PPP-led government to the RPPs, a sum that comes to Rs86 billion in total. A NAB official, present in the meeting, told the PAC that out of 12 cases, five references were filed in the court by NAB and seven references were at the final stage.

Meanwhile, even as one PPP member of the PAC was refusing to take action against illegal RPP agreements signed during the Zardari administration, another PPP member of the PAC, former Water and Power Minister Naveed Qamar, questioned why the Nawaz administration was entering into RPP and Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) import contracts with several of the parties identified as corrupt in the previous administration.

Water and Power Secretary Younus Dhaga replied to that query and said that some of the RPPs whose contracts were declared illegal by the Supreme Court had entered into plea bargain agreements with NAB.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 13^th, 2015.