ISLAMABAD: Five years since the Supreme Court took suo motu notice of the rental power projects scam, the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) has managed to recover half of the amount reportedly embezzled by one of the companies involved.

According to a NAB spokesperson, the bureau has recovered the second tranche of Rs241 million from the owners of Techno Engineering Power (TEP), increasing the amount recovered so far to Rs1.01 billion.

The amount was given by the government to the company in 2008 as a mobilisation advance at the time of the award of the contract to install a power plant at Summundri in Faisalabad.

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Eight other firms were awarded contracts with a view to overcoming electricity crisis in the country. However, almost all of them failed to install power plants within the stipulated time despite the fact that they had received 14 per cent (of total cost of the project) as mobilisation advance from the government.

In the TEP case, NAB’s total liability is said to be Rs2.8bn.

“Director General NAB Rawalpindi handed over a cheque for Rs241m of the recovered amount to Northern Power Generation Company Limited at a ceremony held on Monday,” the spokesman said.

He said in this case former federal secretaries Shahid Rafi and Ismail Qureshi and 10 others had violated rules and were found involved in corruption/corrupt practices and had misused their authority in award of the 150MW rental power project (RPP) contract to TEP causing a huge loss to national exchequer.

Published in Dawn March 10th , 2015

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