ISLAMABAD, Nov 22: An objection by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) may have rightly stopped the construction of a five-star hotel in the city midway, but the National Accountability (NAB) has caught the CAA in the wrong too.

It emerges from a press release issued by NAB on Thursday that while the Capital Development Authority’s “incompetence and negligence” cost the builder of Grand Hyatt Hotel Rs500 million, the ‘faulty design’ and belated construction of the new Islamabad airport by the CAA lost the nation over a billion rupees and 10 years.

It said the underconstruction airport “does not meet the international standards” because the distance between its two airstrips is merely 300 metres when it should have been 800 metres for simultaneous and safe operations on both the strips.

“Chairman NAB took serious notice of the criminal negligence and has directed the Operations Division (of NAB) to conduct an inquiry,” said the press release informing about a briefing given by CAA to the NAB chairman.

However, the chairman “appreciated the efforts of CAA’s present set up” to revisit the charges CAA recovers from international flights, using Pakistan airspace, and domestic and international carriers for providing them facilities on the ground and in the air.

There was no transparent system of accounting and verification of these charges and the CAA had been losing between Rs10 and Rs14 billion per year for the last 20 years on that count, the NAB said, noting that the charges had been static since 1992.

It expected the “good job” done by the present management of CAA would increase its revenues up to Rs27 billion.

It is noteworthy that the NAB has been looking into the CAA’s auditing and billing system pertaining to these charges since March this year.

In briefing the NAB chairman agreed with the CAA that the highrise buildings being allowed in Islamabad posed danger to aviation safety.

They agreed that the CDA planners failed to coordinate with CAA in calculating the permissible safe height of a building. The NAB has since issued instructions to all its regional offices to ask town planners to get their plans cleared by the CAA.

It also asked CAA to improve its procedures “with intensive IT (information technology) facilities for quicker and accurate response to its clients, and for better audit and accounts”.

The builder of the Hyatt Hotel, planned to rise to a height of 708 feet, had sued the CDA for Rs6.5 billion in damages after CAA’s objection that no building in Islamabad is permitted to go up beyond 300 feet, stopped work on the 37-storey hotel.

“We wrote a letter to the Ministry of Defence to relax the rules for once but did not get any response to our request,” an officer of CDA’s finance department told Dawn.