SIX months after he was detained under charges of terror financing, a reference against former petroleum minister Asim Hussain is finally before a court. Even though he was initially picked up on serious charges of maintaining links with terrorists, which were later changed to money laundering, and then again for allegedly having had a role in the stock market crash of 2008, the reference filed before the court contains nothing about these. Instead, the case is built around three major allegations: land fraud for the commercial utilisation of land allotted for charity purposes, building assets abroad through money laundering, and gas curtailment to the fertiliser sector that caused a large loss to the national exchequer.

The gas-related allegations are the crux of the reference, accounting for 97pc of the Rs462bn worth of the alleged corruption. The reference argues that the burden of gas load management was made to fall on fertiliser companies unfairly, and contrary to an ECC decision of 2001 that placed the fertiliser sector on top of the merit order list in gas allocations. Because of this curtailment, the reference claims, fertiliser production in the country fell and the price rose by more than 100pc over three years, necessitating resort to fertiliser imports and price subsidies, the total value of which came to Rs450bn according to figures that were given in the reference. The logic is a bit puzzling for a number of reasons. ECC decisions are subject to change, and a new merit order list that had been drawn up later in the Musharraf era clearly put domestic consumers on top. The figure of Rs450bn in losses incurred due to gas curtailment to the fertiliser sector also needs further scrutiny, since it is not clear how it has been calculated and is suspiciously close to estimates that were given by fertiliser industry representatives in those days of the total losses that would be incurred by the state if a complete shutdown of the sector were to take place. In any event, gas allocations is a highly complex executive decision to be made by the government in power and will always leave some sectors facing losses and crying foul. It will be interesting to see, once the detailed documents are released, how far NAB investigators actually understand the intricacies of such a complex issues upon which they have chosen to build their case.

Published in Dawn, February 28th, 2016