Bail plea in Rs29b corruption reference rejected

NAB had initiated probe into gas scam, money laundering in 2013

HYDRABAD:

The Accountability Court in Hyderabad on Saturday rejected bail plea of Iqbal Z Ahmed, the head of Jamshoro Joint Venture Limited (JJVL), the country's leading Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG) producer, along with his two sons and three other accused.

Following the bail denial in the Rs29 billion corruption reference related to a gas scam and money laundering, National Accountability Bureau (NAB) officials arrested the accused and transferred them to Nara Jail.

The JJVL head, Ahmed's sons, Faseehuddin Ahmed and Raziuddin Ahmed, Qazi Humayun, Asim Iftikhar, and Salamat Ali were among those arrested outside the premises of the court.

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The NAB initiated an investigation into the gas allocation scam in 2013. Ahmed and Salamat were previously arrested on September 4, 2019, in Lahore and later moved to Karachi.

The NAB filed the reference against Ahmed, his sons, and other accused persons in the Accountability Court Hyderabad in 2020.

Although Ahmed and the other accused had earlier secured bail from the Sindh High Court (SHC), during Saturday's hearing, their counsel, Advocate Farooq H Naek, informed the court that his clients had withdrawn their SHC bails.

He urged the accountability court to grant them bail on the grounds on which the SHC had approved their bail.

However, the judge refused to entertain the request, stating that the accused will have to be arrested to be eligible for bail.

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JJVL's LPG extraction plant, commissioned in Jamshoro district in March 2005, initially had a capacity of 200 million standard cubic feet per day (mscfd), later enhanced to 345 mscfd by October 2014. The plant's operation ceased to operate in June 2020 due to the LPG scam and money laundering cases.

In a letter to former Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif in April 2022, Chairman of the LPG Industries Association Irfan Khokhar urged the resumption of JJVL's operation to address the growing LPG shortage and control its rising prices.

According to him, the plant could contribute between 10,000 to 12,000 tons of LPG per month, and its closure from June 21, 2020, to March 31, 2022, had already caused around Rs50 billion in losses to the national exchequer.

Former Sindh chief minister Syed Murad Ali Shah also wrote to the federal government in October 2022, requesting the resumption of gas supply to JJVL due to the province's acute shortage of LPG following monsoon rains and floods in 2022.

 

Published in The Express Tribune, November 12^th, 2023.