KARACHI: The Sindh government is all set to make the Anti-Corruption Establishment (ACE) as powerful as the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) but with no provision for ‘plea bargain’ the federal body offers to suspects of corruption, official said on Tuesday.

Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah dropped the hint recently during an interaction with media persons that the provincial government was planning to ‘enhance’ the ACE’s role through an amendment to the law to enable the organisation to conduct major inquiries.

An official said the proposed amendment would make the ACE more powerful and give it more independence to go after cases of corruption. “After a number of meetings with legal experts and investigators, a set of proposals has been prepared,” he said.

“Several measures have been proposed which will hopefully reform the ACE but there are a few important features which we hope will bring a positive change in overall performance of the organisation. One of the measures is an executive board on the pattern of the NAB’s board,” he said.

The board, he said, would have a chairman, directors and deputy directors as its key members to take decisions and manage other matters related to its primary job. The Sindh Enquiries and Anti-Corruption Act 1991 allowed the government to make and amend rules for such a body, said the official.

The chief minister recently advised the NAB to stop witch-hunt in the province and reminded it that it was not NAB’s job to investigate cases of small-scale corruption but it was the job of the ACE.

He called the NAB a source of ‘harassment’ which was against its defined mandate. Last week, he hinted at reforming the ACE to speed up probe into corruption cases at the provincial level, said the official.

“The proposed reforms will make the ACE more powerful and independent and remove the conventional administrative hurdles to speed up investigations,” he said.

“The idea is to make the provincial body so powerful and independent that it leaves no room for the NAB to intervene. However, there will be no provision in the proposed reforms for the plea bargain like the one offered by the NAB,” he said.

He said the NAB was often criticised for the plea bargain that allowed suspects to negotiate their freedom through an out-of-court settlement after signing a confession and depositing part of the embezzled money as determined by the federal body. The plea bargain had in fact damaged the spirit of entire anti corruption exercise, he added.

“But while pursuing NAB structure as a model for reforms in the ACE, it should remain clear that only those key features will be introduced which are believed to bring a positive change in the provincial body. The features to which the provincial government did not agree have not been made part of the proposed reforms,” he added.

Published in Dawn October 12th, 2016