One of PML-N’s proposals incorporated

National Assembly committee agrees to incorporate one of four proposals put forth by PML-N on the bill to replace NAB.

ISLAMABAD: Government and opposition members of a parliamentary panel on Monday managed to cover some ground to reach consensus on a key accountability bill. However, the two sides were still short of approving the legislation, which was taken up more than one-and-a-half-years ago.

The National Assembly standing committee on law and justice agreed to incorporate one of the four proposals put forth by the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) on the bill to replace the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) with a similar but milder commission.

The development came a day after Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani said in a televised address to the nation that he wanted to see “complete national consensus” on the proposed accountability bill.

The only suggestion by the PML-N that the committee approved was related to the period from which the process of accountability should begin. Over the past year, both the governing Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and the opposition PML-N had been fighting over this issue.

The PPP’s stance was that the process should start from 1985 while the PML-N wasn’t in favour of specifying any timeframe. The panel, chaired by PPP’s MNA Nasim Akhtar Chaudhry, finally agreed to omit that clause from the bill, making the timing for the start of the process unspecified.

Two other issues that remained unresolved were who should head the commission and whether the accounts of public office holders in foreign countries should be frozen by the authorities in case of graft charges against them, a condition with a reference to President Asif Ali Zardari.

The PML-N had been calling for the appointment of a serving Supreme Court judge as the head of the proposed commission while the PPP wanted any person “qualified for the same slot”. During Monday’s meeting, however, it appeared that the PML-N would be easing its hitherto firm stance on the demand. It wasn’t, however, clear whether the party would drop this condition voluntarily or seek something in return from the government.

Another issue on which the two parties disagreed was of including a clause from the 1999 original accountability ordinance to authorise the freezing of foreign accounts of corrupt countrymen, favoured by the PML-N. The draft of the proposed bill did not have this clause.

Chaudhry deferred the meeting with a promise to convene the panel within a week to discuss the remaining disputed clauses.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 19^th, 2010.