Fighting corruption: NAB recovered Rs45b in two and a half years

Bureau’s chief says proactive anti-corruption strategy yielding positive dividends

ISLAMABAD: As part of its anti-corruption efforts, the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) said that it had recovered as much as Rs45 billion in ill-gotten and looted money in the past two and a half years.

In a statement released by the bureau on Sunday, NAB Chairman Qamar Zaman Chaudhry chaired a meeting to review the performance of the operation division at NAB Headquarters.

Noting that eradication of corruption was a top priority for the bureau for which it had adopted a zero tolerance policy, Chaudhry said that they had recovered Rs45 billion in only two and a half years and deposited in the national exchequer.

Emphasising that NAB officers must double their efforts to arrest the corrupt and recover ill-gotten and looted money, he said that the bureau had in the past 16 years received around 326,694 complaints from individuals and various organisations about corruption.

During this period, Chaudhry said NAB had authorised 10,992 complaint verifications, 7,303 inquiries, 3,648 investigations, filed 2,667 corruption references in the respective accountability courts with an overall conviction ratio of around 76 per cent. Moreover, NAB had recovered Rs285 billion from the corrupt and deposited in the national exchequer.

The NAB chief said the bureau’s prime focus was on cases of cheating the public at large by fraudulent financial companies, bank frauds, wilful bank loan defaults, misuse of authority and embezzlement of state funds by government servants etc.

He added that the figures of complaints, inquiries and investigations are almost double as compared to the same period of 2015 to 2016, as he pointed towards the positive dividends of NAB’s proactive anti-corruption strategy.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 6^th, 2017