KARACHI, July 7: The Pakistan Down Caste Front (PDCF) has urged the government to institute a high-level inquiry in to the cooperative societies scandal through which billions of rupees of public money have been swindled.

PDCF chief Mian Aftab further urged the government not to harass and arrest the poor peasants on whose names the influential people and government officials had drawn huge amounts as loans and now were not returning the loans.

He demanded that the real culprits — the government officials, influential people — be brought to book, public money be recovered from them and the harassment of the poor and innocent peasants be stopped.

He said that the influential people, in connivance with the government officials of the departments concerned, established fake cooperative societies, and took loans, which they never did return. He said that now the recovery staff were picking up the illiterate farmers — many of whom did not even know that loans had been obtained in their names by the cooperative societies — and were putting them in jails.

Meanwhile, regional director of the ministry of law, justice and human rights (human rights wing), Sindh Secretariat, has also written a letter to his head office in Islamabad, and terming the issue as being of “sensitive financial nature” has said “the case requires consideration for proper enquiry, may it be at any level, by the federal government.”