NAB enforcement strategy effective to recover billions

Bureau starts investigations immediately on receipt of complaint

ISLAMABAD: NAB Chairman Qamar Zaman Chaudhry has said that NAB is Pakistan’s apex anti-corruption organization which was established in 1999 with the mandate to eliminate corruption and to recover looted money from the  corrupt and deposit it in the national exchequer. The present management of NAB after due deliberations, devised an effective enforcement strategy in order to nab corrupts across the board by adopting zero tolerance policy.

He said that salient features of NAB’s Enforcement Strategy are that NAB is a complaint driven organization and NAB operations start functioning on receipt of a written complaint about an alleged act of corruption & corrupt practices as defined under section 9 of NAO.

The process initiated with verification of the contents of the complaint received and the applicability of the provisions of law. This process is called Complaint Verification (CV) wherein the complainant is called for confirming the evidence available with him and submit affidavit. Once it is determined that the alleged offence falls under NAO and available material justifies for further process, the same is processed for subsequent action.

In the second step, inquiry under section 18 of the NAO is authorized to confirm the committal of offence and collection of evidence to identify the alleged person(s) involved. The record / evidence collection process is supplemented with recording of statements of witnesses and accused persons. During inquiry, the whole process is completed after due deliberations at inquiry level by giving consideration to the role of Combined Investigation Teams (CITs) and in the Regional Executive Board Meetings (RBMs).

Published in The Express Tribune, May 15^th, 2017.