ISLAMABAD, April 14: The issue of the termination of 700 employees of the Zari Taraqiati Bank Limited (ZTBL) took a new turn on Saturday when the National Assembly Standing Committee on Finance was informed that a few individuals at the top had made the decision without taking the board of directors into confidence.
This prompted the standing committee to order ZTBL management to present a complete report on how the former president of the bank, R. A. Chughtai, along with a few individuals fired hundreds of workers just days ahead of the expiry of his own tenure.
Now the employees have been reinstated by the board of directors (BoD) after the new president, Mansoor Khan, took over following weeks of protest demonstrations and strikes by workers’ unions across the country.
The employees had also moved the labour courts and even the Supreme Court against their terminations.
However, the standing committee wanted to uncover the “few faces” behind the episode who had played with the emotions of hundreds of families and was against the interest of the bank.
“We appreciate the decision of reinstatement of the employees, but we also want to know how all this happened,” NA Standing Committee chairman Anwar Ali Cheema said.
Member Liaquat Baloch said that even the Prime Minister’s Secretariat had written to the ZTBL management asking why such a large number of retrenchments had taken place without the knowledge of the government.
“A few people at the top had taken the decision (of sacking employees),” the ZTBL vice-president and head of the human resource department, Munaf Sattar, told the committee. He was unable to answer a volley of questions from the members and repeated the same sentence again and again: “I was not part of the process.”
Members of the committee recommended disciplinary action against the former president.
The committee would also consider whether to go ahead with a separate inquiry to probe the allegations of embezzlement in the bank and the wealth Mr Chughtai had allegedly accumulated during his tenure as the ZTBL president. “The president wanted to teach a lesson to those employees who had been raising their voices against the wrongs being committed in the bank,” committee member Sardar Tufail said.
He said he wondered how Mr Chughtai got a high profile job in another bank.
He requested Mr Cheema to form a sub-committee that could probe the allegations of embezzlement and mismanagement in ZTBL and whether the bank had made any progress during the tenure of the Mr Chughtai, who, he added, was the blue-eyed man of “some people” in power.
