Loan details can’t be withheld from Senate

Withholding information from upper house of parliament is breach of privilege

ISLAMABAD: Senate Chairman Raza Rabbani has ruled that withholding information on lending and waiving loans from the upper house of parliament is a breach of its privilege. The ruling was passed during a daylong session, which was originally requisitioned by the opposition to debate the current political situation.

The ruling came after the State Bank of Pakistan refused to share details of loans in response to questions of a ruling party lawmaker, Tanvir Khan, who sometime back sought information on the people/companies that had obtained loans worth Rs5 million or above from the NBP during the last five years. He had also sought details of loans repaid or written off during this period.



In its written reply, the NBP cited legal provisions to take a strong and apparently justified stance that no bank or financial institution shall divulge any information relating to the affairs of its customers as secrecy of bona fide banking transactions shall be strictly observed.

The NBP referred to Section 33-A of the Banking Companies Ordinance, 1962 and Section 9 of the Protection of Economic Reform Act, 1992 by the National Bank of Pakistan, stating that “the names of persons/companies who have obtained loans from the NBP is private information of the borrowers and is protected”.

However, the NBP provided details of aggregate loans amounting to Rs5 million and above disbursed between July 2011 and June, 2016 which is Rs360 billion. Of the total amount disbursed during this period, loans amounting to Rs271 billion are outstanding which include regular loans worth Rs216 billion and non-performing loans worth Rs55 billion.

“Out of the loans disbursed during the last five years, no loan has been written off,” the bank said in its written reply to Senate.

The reply didn’t go down well with Chairman Rabbani. “No person, organisation, body, authority or government can refuse to provide information to parliament by taking refuge under any rule, regulation or law and that the government [National Bank of Pakistan and Ministry of Finance] has misled parliament by merging two provisions of distinct laws to create impression which was not legally justified,” he said in his ruling.

“This is a deliberate attempt to withhold information from parliament which amounts to a breach of privilege of the house and its members,” Rabbani said in his ruling.



However, he said that keeping in view the stand taken by the minister for law and justice, the NBP through the ministry of finance shall inform the house within 10 days of this ruling regarding the names and actions taken against persons/officials of the NBP and finance ministry who drafted and approved the misleading answer for placing the same before parliament.

Rabbani said the 1973 Constitution places parliament on a different pedestal from that of any organisation or body, same can be fortified by Clause (3) of Article 66 of the Constitution, which provides that the impediment to provision of information can only by the president’s order and not by an act of parliament. Section 9 of the Protection of Economic Reform Act, 1992, and Section 33A of the Banking Companies Ordinance, 1962, do not and cannot put any fetters on the powers of parliament to seek information in the public interest. Information as to names of borrowers neither amounts to ‘banking transaction’ nor to the ‘information relating to the affairs of the customers’.

The chairman maintained that even otherwise, if the government was of the opinion that providing names of persons who have obtained loans would be against public interest, the only available remedy was to make recourse to the provisions of the Senate Rules, 2012, for making request to the Senate chairman in this regard, which request was not made in the instant case.

Later, the Senate deferred the Benami Transactions (Prohibition) Bill.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 5^th, 2016.