ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has become the first head of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation’s (Saarc) Anti-Corruption Forum (ACF) for a year.

“It is a great achievement for NAB as well as for Pakistan,” National Account­ability Bureau’s chairman Qamar Zaman Chaudhry said in a statement issued on Sunday.

He said NAB had organised the first Saarc seminar in the federal capital last month in which representatives of other South Asian countries participated and the ACF was created.

“Pakistan was considered a role model for Saarc countries as it is the only country whose CPI (Corruption Perception Index) ranking has decreased according to the Transparency International’s report from 126 to 117. Due to this reason Pakistan has become the first chairman of the Saarc Anti-Corruption Forum,” he said.

A NAB spokesman said it had been decided during the seminar that the first chairperson of the ACF, for a year, would be from Pakistan, but it had been intimated to the bureau recently.

The Saarc Secretariat was in the process of preparing modalities in this regard, he added.

The official said the Saarc countries had acknowledged the measures taken by Pakistan to curb corruption.

The NAB chief said the bureau had chalked out a national anticorruption strategy under which a zero-tolerance policy and proactive approach to curb corruption had been adopted.

He said that NAB had received about 309,000 complaints from individuals and private and public organisations over the past 16 years and completed about 6,300 inquiries, of which 56 per cent had matured into formal investigations. More than 80pc of the investigations had been taken into the stage of prosecution in courts, he added.

He said that one of the NAB’s major achievements was the recovery and deposit into the national exchequer of around Rs278 billion of ill-gotten money.

The bureau has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Higher Education Commission and over 42,000 character building societies have been set up in universities, colleges and schools during the past year to create awareness among the youth about corruption.

The NAB chairman said that the bureau had devised a system of ‘combined investigation teams’, comprising a director, an additional director, an investigation officer and a senior lawyer, to have collective wisdom of senior supervisory officers. “This will not only lend quality to the work but also ensure that no individual influences the proceedings.”

The bureau initiated disciplinary proceedings against 83 officials over the past two-and-a-half years, of which 60 cases have been finalised, with 22 major and 34 minor penalties and four exonerations.

Published in Dawn, October 17th, 2016