Proactive national strategy required: Chairman NAB

NAB chief says they will tackle graft with an iron hand

The top anti-corruption watchdog in the country has reiterated its resolve to leave no stone unturned to wipe out corruption from the country and crack down with an iron hand to eradicate the scourge once and for all.

This was stated by National Accountability Bureau (NAB) Chairman Qamar Zaman Chaudhry while chairing a monthly coordination meeting at the bureau’s headquarters to review progress on decisions taken in the past month, a statement issued by the body on Friday said.  Chaudhry said that they needed to adopt a proactive national anti-corruption strategy to eliminate corrupt practices from the country.

Over the past 16 years, the NAB chief said they had received around 326,694 complaints from individuals and organisations- both public and private.  During this period, he said that NAB had authorised 10,992 complaint verifications, 7,303 inquiries, 3,648 investigations, filed 2,667 corruption references in respective accountability courts while the overall conviction ratio was around 76 per cent.

He added that NAB’s primary focus was on cases of public cheating, bank frauds, fraudulent financial companies, willful bank loan defaults, misuse of authority and embezzlement of state funds by government servants.

Chaudhry further said that the body had managed to recover Rs287 billion in ill-gotten money.  Moreover, he pointed out the number of complaints against corrupt practices had doubled in the same period from 2014 to 2015.

This increase in the number of complaints, he suggested, reflected enhanced public trusted in NAB.

In this regard, he said that PILDAT in its report had noted that 42 per cent of the public trust the anti-corruption watchdog when compared to other government departments such as police whom 30 per cent of people trusted, and 29 per cent for government officials.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 13^th, 2017.