MUZAFFARGARH: An accountability court in Multan sentenced to 10 years in jail and a Rs50 million each to two accused in the National Bank pensioners account fraud of Muzaffargarh on Friday. Those convicted are Ghulam Shabbir, bank cashier, and Nazar Abbas, a peon. Sixteen other officials of the bank and the accounts office, who also stood trial, were declared innocent.

Two years back, the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) arrested 18 officials of the District Accounts Office and the National Bank, Muzaffargarh city branch, for embezzling Rs420 million from the pensioners accounts. Later, the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) stepped in, and took over the custody of the accused. NAB officials filed a reference against the accused without making any recovery.

One accused, Muntazir Mehdi, was declared proclaimed offender while Khadim Husain, Manazir Thaheem, Shoaib, Yaseen, Khalid, Maqsood, Nawaz, Kamran, Qaiser, Aziz, Safdar, Mushtaq, Mubashir, Ghulam Hussain, Shehryar and Jameel Jafri were declared innocent.

The scam surfaced in April 2016 when six bank officials and 10 others from the account office were arrested by the FIA. Up to 10,000 pensioners draw a Rs100 million pension from the National Bank city main branch every month whereas transactions by the accounts office and the NBP made it Rs188 million per month. The accounts officials did not check voucher lists of pensions of a monthly basis. The then district accounts officer alerted the FIA and the Accountant General of Punjab for a probe.

The National Bank on its part suspended cashiers from service for embezzlement in pension funds. Later, five departments launched as many probes and the State Bank of Pakistan asked the Nation Bank to deposit the embezzled money in the accounts office account.

One of the officials said the NAB made these two lower staff a scapegoat and let other officials of accounts office, treasury and National Bank off the hook by facilitating them to get bail.

Published in Dawn, January 27th, 2019