Senior officer returns to CDA six months on

Authority issues notification posting Irfanullah Khan as enforcement director

ISLAMABAD: An officer, who had been sent packing from the civic authority six months ago on charges of large-scale misappropriations, returned to the body on Thursday as the director of enforcement.

According to a notification issued by the Capital Development Authority (CDA) Human Resource Department (HRD), two gazetted officers were handed posts in the city.

This included basic pay scale (BPS)-18 officer Irfanullah Khan from the elite Foreign Services Group. He was posted as the Enforcement (Urban) Director.

Irfanullah had been previously posted in the Land and Rehabilitation Directorate on a look-after-charge basis.

Last year in December, he had been asked to relinquish his charge and report to the HRD of CDA in the wake of allegations of large-scale misappropriations.

Former CDA Chairman Sheikh Anser Aziz had cancelled the allotment of over a 100 plots which Irfanullah had allegedly allotted through a ‘corrigendum’ in 2017.



The federal investigation agency (FIA) is also conducting an inquiry against him.

CDA officials claimed that when the BPS-18 officer was a director in the land directorate, he had allegedly changed the locations of plots from less valuable locations and sectors to relatively more expensive locations, thereby facilitating the allottees to earn millions through a mutual understanding in each case.

The land directorate officials apparently did this after allegedly getting massive bribes for each case from allottees, some officials claimed.

It was alleged that Irfanullah had accommodated a Chak Shahzad property dealer whose three plots were shifted from the impoverished Sector I-12, where a plot is priced at around Rs2.5 million, to Chak Shahzad, where
a plot of the same size is worth Rs15 million.

Working on deputation from the Foreign Services Group, Irfanullah had served as a staff officer for former Capital Administration and Development Division (CADD) Minister Dr Tariq Fazal Chaudhry, before joining the Land Directorate.

The directorate had been in the headlines over the past year for alleged corruption.

In August 2017, it had allotted plots to affected people in Sectors I-11 and I-12, since a plot worth Rs2.5 million in Sector I-12 cost Rs6 million, in Sector I-11.



CDA officials claimed that no criteria were adopted for differentiating between Sectors I-12 and I-11 when allotting plots, pointing to massive corruption.

“Those who gave money to corrupt land directorate officials were accommodated in Sector I-11, and those who did not grease officials’ palms, were allotted plots in Sector I-12,” a CDA official alleged.

The other officer who was included in the announcement was BPS-19 officer Ishrat Taj Warsi from the engineering cadre. He has been given the charge of Enforcement Deputy Director General (DDG) on a temporary basis. He was currently working as the Enforcement (urban) Director.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 15^th, 2018.