ISLAMABAD: Law Minister Zahid Hamid on Monday assured the Senate Standing Committee on Law and Justice that a parliamentary committee comprising members of the National Assembly and the Senate would soon be constituted to review all laws of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB).

The minister gave the assurance after the committee members expressed concern cover the provisions of voluntary return and plea bargain in the NAB laws and the powers of the bureau’s chairman to determine the amount to be recovered from the accused.

The opposition members, mostly from the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), termed the provisions of plea bargain “black laws” and accused NAB of promoting corruption instead of eliminating the menace.

The committee headed by Javed Abbasi of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) was unanimous that instead of reviewing only Section 25 of the NAB Ordinance, 1999, which deals with voluntary return and plea bargaining, the whole ordinance was needed to be reviewed.

During the proceedings, the committee also witnessed a brief altercation between Leader of the Opposition in the Senate Aitzaz Ahsan and the law minister when the former asked if NBA had ever interrogated Hussain Nawaz and Hassan Nawaz — the two sons of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif — on the issue of Benami properties.

Objecting to the question, the law minister accused Mr Ahsan of intentionally raising an “irrelevant matter” in the presence of media and thus “unnecessary trying to spoil the atmosphere”.

The matter had been referred to the committee by Senate Chairman Raza Rabbani during the last session when PPP’s Farhatullah Babar and other senators criticised NAB for its recent controversial decision of giving a clean chit to former finance secretary of Balochistan Mushtaq Raisani and two others after striking a plea bargain deal with them.

However, senior NAB officials during their briefing on the working of the bureau termed the provisions of voluntary return and plea bargain effective and useful tools in recovering the looted money.

Opposing the committee members’ suggestion to abolish the said provisions, the NAB officials said any such step would affect the bureau’s performance.

NAB Director General Zahid Shah informed the members that the bureau had so far recovered an amount of over Rs37 billion from 4,565 accused since its inception in 1999. He said that since 2010, NAB had recovered Rs25.56bn from 2,591 accused through voluntary return and plea bargain.

Moreover, he said, the concept of plea bargain was not new and it was present in the judicial system in many countries, including the US, Canada, India, Estonia, France, Georgia, Ger­many, Italy, Poland and Switzerland.

Earlier, PPP’s Farhatullah Babar said the NAB law was used for “political re-engineering” and there should be no sacred cows, if the law was to be reviewed. He accused the NAB chairman of misusing his powers by striking the plea bargain deal with Mr Raisani and alleged that it seemed that the deal had been made to save some “other influential people”.

NAB’s Deputy Chairman Imtiaz Tajwar said the bureau had recovered Rs3.5 billion from Mr Raisani, besides confiscating his 11 houses worth Rs2bn in Karachi’s Defence locality.

The committee also considered a constitution amendment bill introduced by Sassui Palijo and Mukhtiar Ahmed Dhamrah for granting the status of national language to the regional languages.

Speaking in support of the bill, Ms Palijo said the regional languages needed to be given a proper recognition which would help promote national integration and build a strong federation.

It was said that another PPP senator, Karim Ahmed Khawaja, had also moved a similar bill. The committee decided to consider both the bills together in the next meeting.

Published in Dawn, January 3rd, 2017