Extension sought for poor performing CDA official

CDA violates the federal cabinet’s rules by seeking a year’s extension in Member Finance’s contract.

ISLAMABAD: Capital Development Authority (CDA) violated the federal cabinet’s rules by seeking a year’s extension in Member Finance’s contract.

CDA chairman Imtiaz Inayat Elahi forwarded the one year extension summary of Saeedur Rehman to the Cabinet Division for “appropriate action”.

Rehman’s three-year contract period ended on October 10, 2010, but the civic body requested that the cabinet secretary grant an extension.

Official sources in CDA said that the deepening financial crunch was testimony to the Member Finance’s inability to evolve an effective strategy.

“This has been the worst three-year period in terms of finance and by the end of the month CDA won’t have enough funds to pay its employees their salary,” said an official. This is the first time in history that CDA took an overdraft from the State Bank of Pakistan to pay salaries to their employees, claimed another source.

CDA currently owes over Rs2billion to contractors, proof of which is provided by the lingering of Zero Point interchange project which is being delayed because the contractor has lost faith in the body’s ability to pay.

By delaying payments, CDA forces the contractor to invest in the project until they run out of funds.

The latest venture of the Member Finance has been the issuance of municipal bonds which was received very poorly by the public due to the authority’s deteriorating credit worthiness. Normally such bonds are announced with the exact use being pre-defined. The authority said that consultants had been hired and this would soon be done. Five months have passed in this expectation.

During his services in National Logistics Cell, Rehman was accused of embezzling approximately Rs0.50 billion. While irregularities in different projects worth Rs12 billion were also detected by the Auditor General of Pakistan in CDA’s audit report 2008-2009.

“More than 15 questions were not replied and about 20 answers were not satisfactory that were asked from Finance Member CDA during the preparation of this report,” audit report observed.

CDA spokesperson confirmed that the extension issue was in consideration. The decision, he said, was made in the greater interest of CDA, as Rehman was an experienced official.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 2^nd, 2010.