ISLAMABAD: In a reshuffle in the senior bureaucracy, the federal government has assigned the lucrative post of secretary petroleum to retired Capt Mohammad Mehmood, who was one of the accused in the Rawalpindi Ring Road scam case.

Mr Mehmood was an officer on special duty (OSD) when the case surfaced last year. The case is pending before the Anti-Corruption Court of Lahore and he is required to appear in court on Thursday (today).

The Establishment Division on Wednesday notified his posting as additional secretary in-charge (Petroleum Division).

The notification stated that Mr Mahmood “a BS-21 officer of Pakistan Administrative Service, presently posted as OSD, Establishment Division, is transferred and posted as Additional Secretary (In-charge), Petroleum Division, with immediate effect and until further orders.”

As many as 13 bureaucrats, including Mr Mehmood and Land Acquisition Collector Waseem Ali Tabish, involved in the Rawalpindi Ring Road corruption scandal have been acquitted, according to an order issued by the Establishment Division.

His predecessor Ali Raza Bhutta, a BS-22 officer of PAS, has been transferred to the Council of Common Interests (CCI).In another posting, the Establishment Division appointed Yusuf Khan, a BS-21 officer of PAS to take care of affairs related to the Benazir Income Support Programme. Mr Khan was serving the CCI as secretary.

The Establishment Division, earlier in July, this year exonerated Mr Mehmood from charges after Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif ordered a departmental inquiry into the Ring Road case.

However, in the subsequent week, the trial court indicted him as well as 13 other officials in the said case.

According to Mr Mehmood’s counsel Burhan Mozzam Malik, the trial court is recording statements of the prosecution witnesses and so far five out of 30 prosecution witnesses have testified.He, however, said that none of the five witnesses substantiated any allegation levelled against his client.

Last year, the length of the Rawalpindi Ring Road, intended to relieve the city of traffic congestion, had been increased to 23 kilometres to allegedly benefit a housing society and other potential estate developers in the area, for which the government had to shell out Rs20 billion to buy additional land.

When the case came to light, the PTI government set up a three-member committee to hold an inquiry.The committee submitted two reports, one by its head, the then Rawalpindi Commissioner Syed Gulzar Hussain Shah, which accused bureaucrats of favouring housing societies, and the other by two other committee members, which claimed that changes were approved by more senior authorities.

The Rawalpindi Ring Road was conceived during the previous tenure of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and revised by the PTI government.

The Anti-Corruption Establishment (ACE), Punjab, probed the allegations and filed a complaint in the trial court.As per the allegation, the former commissioner and the land acquisition collector Wasim Tabish caused a loss of over Rs10 billion to the national exchequer by allowing big developers of housing societies to establish five interchanges on the ring road.

Published in Dawn, October 13th, 2022