PAC meeting: Shah endorses illegal hiring in PPP tenure

Industries ministry was ordered to regularise 4,200 employees.

ISLAMABAD:

In the second such move in just over a week, Opposition Leader Khursheed Shah took advantage of his position as chairman of the National Assembly Public Accounts Committee to legitimise over 4,200 unlawful hires in state-owned retailer Utility Stores Corporation during his party’s tenure in office, overriding the objections of the Auditor General of Pakistan.

Shah’s act of blatant partisanship is the second such time he has taken advantage of his position as the government’s top watchdog. On February 24, Shah condoned his Pakistan Peoples Party’s illegal hiring of 7,000 people into state-owned power companies during the PPP administration.

When it first came into office in 2008, the PPP-led government advertised for 3,250 positions in Utility Stores Corporation, but the government ended up hiring 4,250 people and the majority were hired in violation of government rules and regional quotas, said the Director General of Commercial Audit and Evaluation. “Although the excess recruitment was only 708, the glaring nature of the violations put a question mark on the whole recruitment process.



Industries Secretary Raja Hasan Abbas, the top bureaucrat in the ministry that controls USC on the government’s behalf, admitted that the recruitments were in violation of laws that govern hiring at state-owned companies.

However, despite this testimony from government officials, Shah ordered all such appointments to be regularised, turning down the Auditor General’s request to order a fact-finding inquiry into the matter, and ordering the industries secretary to place the records of the case with the PAC.

This move prompted alarm from Auditor General Akhtar Buland Rana and other members of the PAC, who spoke out against Shah. “I am under oath to disclose these illegal appointments to Parliament. These appointments were made on the basis of nepotism. Even the prime minister does not have the right to make a single appointment in violation of the rules, and action should be taken against the officials responsible for this,” said Rana.

The bulk of the staff appears to have been hired in Lahore, at the expense of candidates from other parts of the country.

“All the appointments were unlawful and unconstitutional and if the PAC still wants to regularise these, it is up to it,” said Mahmood Khan Achakzai of the Pashtoonkhwa Milli Awami Party. A PML-N legislator pointed out that the PAC did not have the powers to regularise the appointments.

PAC members also showed their displeasure over the way the USC was run. The auditors revealed that there was no permanent managing director of the USC and all the affairs were run on an ad-hoc basis. The corporation did not finalise its accounts for the last two years and there was no authentic audited record available of billions of rupees worth of transactions that the entity was carrying out, said the federal auditors.

Urea black marketing

The PAC referred the matter of theft of over 1,100 metric tons of imported urea in 2010 to NAB for investigation. It suspected that the commodity was sold in the black market by the carriage contractor in connivance of the
corrupt officials at the state-owned National Fertilizer Marketing Ltd.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 5^th, 2015.