ISLAMABAD: The government on Monday suspended the services of six officers of Central Directorate of National Savings (CDNS) for misplacement of record and loss to public funds at a Lahore branch.

A notification said the six officers were ‘directly or indirectly involved in the said scam’ and had been suspended on completion of an investigation on October 24. They were allegedly accused of misplacement of record of National Savings Centre, DHA-Lahore and for causing loss to public exchequer on account of fraudulent activities.

Those suspended included NSOs Arshad Hussain and Samreen Rehman (both national saving officers and officers incharge), Sajid Masood and Fahad Hassan (both cashiers and JNSOs or joint national saving officers) and cashiers Sajid Mehmood and Seemal Shahid (both JNSOs).

The notification said the suspended officers will be entitled to subsistence allowance as permissible under rules.

A group of officers and their accomplices were reported to have siphoned off more than Rs200 million from the DHA Lahore Branch, breaching the trust of more than 7m, mostly widows, pensioners, orphans and other small-to-medium individual savers.

Published in Dawn, November 6th, 2018