ISLAMABAD: A labour court hearing a case of job benefits dubiously given to hundreds of employees of the Capital Development Authority is likely to hand over investigations into the case to the National Accountability Bureau (NAB).
“If the CDA thinks it cannot cope with the issue than this court [National Industrial Relations Commission] can refer the matter to the NAB,” Justice Raja Fayyaz had observed in recently while hearing the case.
The observation came after the CDA submitted a list of nearly 100 employees who benefited in the past from re-designation and up-gradation of low-cadre posts in the civic agency in violation of the CDA Ordinance, 1960 and other service rules. However, the court had termed the list as incomplete.
Earlier, an internal fact-finding committee of the CDA headed by Administration DG Sohail Durrani had unearthed cases of some 375 officials of the civic agency who had received illegal promotions and other benefits on fake or forged documentation.
The internal inquiry was carried out following the directions of the National Industrial Relations Commission (NIRC), commonly known as the labour court, which was earlier moved by some officials for resizing of residential plots given to them by the authority on the basis of their previous designations.
In government service, two separate terms — re-designation and up-gradation of posts — are rarely used. Occasionally, lower-grade employees serving on dead-end posts such as tube well operators are upgraded as a way to give a salary increase to the employee, but the job title remains the same.
This and other similar government service rules were widely abused at the authority in the past to benefit hundreds of employees.
The authority did not limit itself to one of the two options — re-designating or upgrading — but went ahead and carried out both simultaneously.
In the past, hundreds of employees benefited from the practice and after re-designation and upgradation of their posts, they obtained departmental promotions. Later, these employees moved different courts with pleas that the CDA gave them smaller residential plots on the basis of their previous positions and now that their scales had been raised, their plots allocations should be upgraded.
Similarly, some officials pleaded the court to shift their residential plots from sectors where land is cheaper to the costlier ones.
The committee found that in almost all of the 375 cases, the officials either attached fake or forged documents about their service history to qualify for the up-gradations, or in some cases, the officials mandated to take decisions abused their discretionary powers to the benefit of employees who were not meeting the required and defined criteria. Durrani said so far CDA had forwarded some 176 cases of illegal promotions to the NIRC, while some other cases which were completed recently would also be submitted to the court within the next few days.
He said the CDA was trying to deal with the investigations internally without involving NAB, adding that if the case is decided against the officials under question then the excess salaries and other monetary benefits they obtained after their promotions would be deducted from their pensions.
Published in The Express Tribune, November 3rd, 2014.
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