KARACHI, Feb 19: A federal law attorney will inform the Sindh High Court whether the Pakistan Post Office is prepared to deposit with the SHC nazir Rs298,207,618 admitted by it to have been misappropriated by a former employee of its City Courts branch.

The admission was made by the post office or the Postal Services Corporation on Thursday in its comments in a writ petition filed by Advocate M. Ilyas Khan and others in a 30- million-rupee scam.

Appearing for the petitioners, Barrister Abdul Hafiz Pirzada requested the division bench seized of the case to order the post office to deposit a sum equal to the admitted liability with the SHC nazir for reimbursement to genuine depositors.

Deputy Attorney-General Syed Zaki Mohammad, who submitted the comments on behalf of the respondents, stated that he required further instructions from the authorities. The amount had been misappropriated by Izhar Hussain Siddiqui, who continued to work at the City Courts post office savings bank on his retirement after a long service.

The accused was in the custody of the National Accountability Bureau, which was investigating the scam and processing a reference, the attorney said. The bench, which consisted of Justices Anwar Zaheer Jamali and S. Ali Aslam Jafri, asked the attorney to seek the requisite instructions and place them before it on March 16.

The scam involves about Rs30 million received from a number of account holders, mainly lawyers, but not actually deposited in the postal savings bank.

The post office said in its comments on Thursday that over Rs29.820 million of the public funds was misappropriated by the accused by withdrawing amounts from the savings accounts without proper entry in the pass-books; by opening accounts with heavy deposits without crediting them or sending the documents for registration to the Karachi GPO (general post office); by opening accounts without assigning any account number; by allotting one account number to several holders; and by unauthorizedly paying profits over and above the prescribed rate.

Defrauded depositors, the post office stated, have submitted 116 pass-books which have no record in the GPO. A total of 472 pass-books were seized from the accused.

The post office proposed that all claims/balance amounts entered in the savings pass-books duly stamped and signed and presented in original by the claimants/account holders may be refunded within 90 days from the date of the court decision subject to certain conditions.

The conditions include verification of signatures of account holders by handwriting experts, deduction of unauthorized profit, no payment of profit in subsequent accounts to the depositors who had opened more than one account in the same category, recovery of Zakat and withholding tax, and no further profit on amounts received from the customers but not deposited in the public exchequer.

One hundred and fifty-two cases wherein the balance in the pass-books is equal or less than the balance in the GPO record, the post office said, had been declared operational and the account holders had been allowed to operate them normally. A list of 472 account holders, who approached the post office for the settlement of their accounts, was annexed to the comments.