Eight officials booked for ‘assisting wheat smuggling’

Anti-corruption official claims they took hundreds of thousands of rupees daily in bribes over past four months

HYDERABAD:

As a wheat shortage appears to creep up in Sindh, authorities seem to have woken up to the menace of wheat smuggling after the grain continued to be illegally transported from Sindh to Punjab and Afghanistan over the past four months.

As a result, eight officials of the food, revenue and police departments have been booked by the Anti-Corruption Establishment (ACE), on the orders of Sukkur commissioner Shafiqur Ahmed Mahesar.

Among them, five, including Ghotki food controller Roshan Ali Panhwar, mukhtiarkar Abdul Rasheed Kalhoro and three policemen, have been arrested. The remaining three, including a food supervisor, Faheem Dahar, and two food inspectors, Sardar Mirani and Hafeez Joyo, have escaped to prevent their arrests.

"For the last four months, these officials have been collecting hundreds of thousands [rupees] in bribes per day, in exchange for assisting wheat smuggling through dozens of trucks and trawlers carrying tonnes of produce," ACE SP Muneer Ahmed Khuhro told the media on Saturday.

On Friday alone, 17 trucks crossed Sindh's border in connivance with these officials and entered Punjab, he added. "They collected Rs270,000 in bribe in just one day. We are now assessing how much bribe they collected over the last four months."

According to Khuhro, the amounts collected as bribe were shared among the officials of the three departments.

The ACE took action against the officers after a meeting, headed by Sukkur commissioner at Ghotki deputy commissioner's office, was briefed on the issue and the commissioner gave approval for initiating action against the errant officials.

The Sindh government had imposed a ban on the inter-provincial movement of wheat as soon as the crop's harvest began in the province. The wheat shortage, triggering a hike in flour prices, occurred first in Punjab and began to plague Sindh a week later in July.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 9^th, 2020.