ISLAMABAD: Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Umar Ata Bandial expressed dissatisfaction with the performance of the National Accountability Bureau on Thursday and regretted the resignation of its chairman earlier this week, describing him as a highly professional police officer who enjoyed good reputation.

The CJP was referring to the resignation earlier this week of Aftab Sultan, the NAB chairman. His observations came during the hearing of a challenge to the amendments made last year in the National Accountability Ordinance (NAO).

The CJP cited a pending case regarding bail before arrest of an accused who had already served three years in jail and who had paid the entire amount in question in the corruption reference, but was still behind bars.

“That’s NAB,” the CJP regretted, adding that the Supreme Court, in a case about the criminal justice system, had called for complete digital record of entire references pending with the bureau.

“I hope NAB must have provided a record of the cases,” Justice Bandial observed. But he expressed doubts that the NAB had complete record of all the cases because it lacked a database.

Justice Bandial says there’s nothing wrong with accountability law, but what matters is its implementation

“Who says NAB is efficient,” the CJP observed, adding that “unfairness has been committed by NAB” in certain cases.

The CJP agreed with an argument by Imran Khan’s counsel Khawaja Haris Ahmed that nothing was wrong with the accountability law, but what matters was its implementation.

Instead of improving the law, he added, “they just revised it by providing across the board amnesty” and even punished victims on the basis of “personal vendetta”.

These observations came when senior counsel Makhdoom Ali Khan, who represents the federal government, pointed out holes in the reply furnished before the apex court by NAB about the fate of references after the amendment.

Data mismatch

The counsel recalled that in one of its reports NAB had said 221 references had been returned and 41 acquittals made after the amendments, while in another report, the bureau said it had returned 364 cases. “There is a gap of 143 cases.”

Makhdoom Ali Khan wondered which report “should we believe in” and which ones “should we reject”.

The bureau had neither disclosed the number of cases returned and acquittals, nor did it reveal the number of politicians facing corruption references, the government’s counsel said.

“I wanted to calculate the amount involved in the references that have been returned, but then I got confused whether to rely on the report suggesting 221 cases had been returned or on the other which said the number of returned cases stood at 364,” the counsel said.

Even the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) was silent about the money recovered by NAB and where it had been deposited.

Chief Justice Bandial said it was meaningful that no accountability case had been referred to any forum so far after the amended law barred NAB from taking up cases involving an amount exceeding Rs500 million.

Published in Dawn, February 24th, 2023