June 19, 2008	Thursday	Jamadi-us-Sani 14, 1429

LAHORE, June 18: Pakistan is facing the menace of corruption in social, economic and social sectors which is affecting our national and individual character, says National Accountability Bureau (NAB) Punjab director-general (DG) Shahnawaz Badar.

Speaking at the seminar on public frauds here on Wednesday, the DG said Pakistan ranked 138 out of 179 nations in the anti-corruption ranking at the international level. Countries like Korea and Malaysia which used to seek guidance from Pakistan in 1960s had left us far behind and had emerged as most modern developed nations with high ant-corruption international rankings.

He said that corruption had become an accepted way of life and threatened the basic fabric of society. Public frauds, which involved cheating at large, were a severe form of corruption. He said since its inception, NAB had handled several major scams like cooperative societies, forex and Double Shah.

Sponsors of dubious housing societies and financial schemes lured the citizens into investing their hard-earned incomes and savings with promises of attractive returns and profits. He said that NAB had prosecuted the accused in such cases and many of them were convicted and were serving their sentences in jails.

NAB awareness and prevention director Brig Farooq Hamid (retired) said the bureau had made overall Rs1,230 billion recovery during the last eight years, which was the highest one. He said that NAB made a recovery of Rs2 billion in cash and Rs10.6 billion through sale of 117 properties of cooperative finance companies and returned Rs8.37 billion to 235,065 claimants.

He said that in Double Shah scam NAB had recovered Rs1.5 billion through voluntary return and returned Rs530 million to 10,000 claimants. The recoveries of Rs1.7 billion were made from forex companies and returned Rs75 million and returned to 1,500 claimants.

Provincial ministers Chaudhry Abdul Ghafoor, Muhammad Ishaq and Farooq Yousaf Gurki also spoke.