This follows on from my column of last Sunday, on the topic of a perceived scam in Pakistan Steel Mill. All one has to do is to write such a column and one is snowed under with e-mail messages, letters, copies of documents, tape recordings and telephone calls - mostly from persons who are either anonymous, or who give their names but say that they do not wish to be quoted or named.

After having read the column, several persons sprang into action - middlemen, brokers and sellers of PSM's products who tried to convince me that the chairman, Lt Colonel Afzal Khan, was not corrupt and had performed wonders at the mill. Re-read the column, they were told, Afzal Khan has not been accused of corruption. It is no fault of his that he now has to serve under Minister Liaquat Jatoi, who is famed for his blatant corruption. The responsibility for whitening and resurrecting Jatoi lies firmly with President General Pervez Musharraf. However, to the credit of the general, he has admitted that he had no option but to make 'compromises' against his better judgment while democratizing the government. We ask: at whose and at what cost?

Then there was a spate of Afzal Khan's well-wishers who visited - looking to the right, to the left, before whispering 'Do you know that Afzal is a close friend of Musharraf? He was his batch mate at Kakul.' Of course I knew, having met many, many men who have conveyed one way or another that they were his kindergarten mates, his school mates, his college mates, his mates at the PMA, his regimental mates, his division mates, his corps mates, and those who had served with or under him in the army - if totalled, they would come to a few hundred thousand.

And finally, four irate senior retired, gainfully re-employed officers of the Pakistan army, all men of the artillery, rang to object to the fact that I had mentioned that Afzal Khan was a former gunner. Not at all so, they said, and demanded an apology. The man was a 'paidal'. These braves also requested that they not be identified.

Colonel Khan is a remarkable man. He has been able not only to survive, but also to thrive, in a government organization for almost twenty years, under over half a dozen corrupt, incompetent governments. He joined PSM in the mid-1980s amongst the ranks of some 25 general managers, was sacked and reinstated three times, on the last occasion with a promotion elevating him to the top of the ladder - and he has the gall to claim that he 'sacrificed' his career in the larger PSM interest. He has successfully rid the mill of some 5,000 unwanted personnel, many of them 'ghost' employees who existed merely on the payroll - no mean achievement.

He has a myriad of court cases filed against him for wrongful dismissal and other issues, which he is valiantly facing. One complaint of the buyers is that under Colonel Khan the mill has shown comparatively outstanding financial results, though lately it has somewhat decreased the quantum of production. What he has done is to impose an indiscriminate increase and to manipulate the prices of the products he sells, the import of some of which is banned or restricted, and by doing so he is thus hurting the country's economy. The manufacturers and users in some cases have to pay excessively above what they would have otherwise had to pay. We, the buyers of the final product, have to suffer in silence - just one of the many misfortunes we must bear because of our government's incompetence.

The colonel holds a high-risk job, and he is in need of luck. One of his predecessors, Sajjad Hussain, was murdered as he was about 'to spill the beans'. The politician suspected of having committed the crime is still under trial. Another predecessor, Usman Faruqui, made millions for himself and his bosses but now languishes in Karachi's Central Prison.

Now, to get to the 'core issue' - the following questions remain unanswered:

1) For the 2003-2008 supply contracts, why were bids invited in November 2002 on the basis of the well-tested 20-year old criteria of evaluation?

2) Why were the criteria of evaluation changed on March, 9, 2003 after the bids had come in and had been evaluated?

3) Why were the previous tenders, which had come in, not scrapped and fresh bids re-invited to suit the new criteria?

4) When tenderers, who had won according to the old criteria, made protests, and General Mohammed Mohsin's committee was appointed to examine these contentious issues, why were the existing contracts not extended?

5) When the committee asked for bids to be reinvited, why were the old contracts not extended? (The fact remains that the old contracts had to be extended in order to give PSM time to re-invite tenders on the basis of altered criteria.)

7) Why was this done only five days before the contracts were to expire? Transparency? Hardly, rather foul play to accommodate a new unreliable supplier of untested worth.

8) What was the compulsion that required circumstances to be engineered to sign up a dubious untested supplier?

9) Why is the nation thereby being made to lose tens of millions of dollars?

10) And, most pertinently, why has General Mohsin's report not been made available to the board of directors, the men responsible for the management of PSM?

Many more questions arise. An 'insider' has sent me a detailed note, a copy of which I am forwarding to board member Ali Raza, who heads the nation's largest bank, the National Bank of Pakistan, and to board member Tariq Kirmani, who heads the nation's largest organization, Pakistan State Oil, neither government servants but both private sector men of eminence, with the request that they requisition a special board meeting to consider General Mohsin's report and the ensuing devious manoeuvring.

This is no longer a perceived scam - it is an actual one. But the loss can yet be salvaged.