ISLAMABAD: The National Accountability Bureau (NAB), has summoned the entire team of eight employees of the Pakistan Standard and Quality Control Authority (PSQCA) who had been working with an officer facing an inquiry on a financial irregularity amounting to around Rs1 billion.
The inquiry relates to a grade 18 officer, who is accused of getting profit through improper investments, by depositing the PSQCA money in personal bank accounts between 2014 and 2017.
Based on the documents forwarded by NAB Rawalpindi to its Karachi office, Deputy Director Finance Ali Mohammad Bukhari has been summoned along with details and documentation related to the case.
However, since the accused did not respond to the earlier notices by NAB, a new notice was forwarded to the PSQCA director general on June 6.
The accountability bureau has summoned all staff and officers attached with him. Among them are two assistant directors (grade -17), stenographer (grade-16), computer operator (grade-14), junior computer operator (grade-12) lab assistant (grade-5) and even a grade 1 employee.
Talking to Dawn, an official of NAB said the officers of PSQCA were not responding to the earlier notices, therefore the whole team had been summoned for the inquiry.
The last letter was forwarded to the Ministry of Science and Technology (MoST), as the PSQCA is its attached department, in December 2022, but details were not provided to NAB, he added.
Meanwhile, a senior official of MoST said there were inquiries in this regard and the new summon of NAB had been received by the ministry.
“It has been forwarded to the PSQCA, asking it to share the relevant documents with the accountability bureau,” the official added.
The NAB report claims that the amount was transferred to several bank accounts reportedly for PSQCA investment but such transactions and suspicious investments were in violation of government rules and directives.
The accountability bureau had issued the first letter to the ministry on May 19, 2022, which was forwarded to PSQCA on June 4, 2022, in which documents were demanded to conduct the ‘Forensic Audit of PSQCA Investment Funds’.
The inquiry was initiated following audit reports of the auditor general of Pakistan (AGP) about the massive financial irregularities and illegal appointments in the PSQCA.
The NAB documents also highlight that apart from suspicious transactions, Mr Bukhari, who served in the finance department of PSQCA from 2008 to 2022 was also involved in alleged financial irregularities regarding reinvestment worth more than Rs1 billion in various bank branches related to term deposit receipts (TDRs) involving the pension fund of the PSQCA.
Published in Dawn, June 14th, 2023
