LAHORE: The Parks and Horticulture Authority (PHA) faces massive corruption and inefficiencies if internal whistle blowers, documents they produce, audit objections and former officers involved in the running of the authority are to be believed.
In the latest spate of letters to National Accountability Bureau (NAB), anti-corruption establishment and the parent department (Housing), over Rs110 million bungling has been pointed out by the staff of the authority, bemoaning absence or delay in inquiries to punish the culprits.
In one incident, the director general held an investigation against his own director finance, accusing him of violating rules, transferring authority’s money in an unauthorised (personal) account for next 15 months, minting Rs7.8 million profit before returning the money to the PHA.
Later, another Rs4.4m met the same fate. Since the DG and the [accused] director both belonged to the same grade (PBS-19), the matter was referred to the housing secretary who deputed a grade-20 officer for inquiry. After keeping the inquiry orders with him for the next two months, the officer wrote back in early January to the PHA that he was going to retire and could not hold the probe.
Letters to anti-corruption watchdogs point out irregularities
“The matter would now be sent back to the parent department for reassigning another officer,” says [the current] director general Muzaffar Khan Sial. However, some officers in the PHA think that the matter has been under scrutiny for the last one year and the director may retire before it (inquiry) gets to the conclusion if the current pace continues.
The same application also accuses another official (horticulture director) of getting Rs23m as advance for carrying out development work but never got this money reconciled; the amount is still pending against him. The audit objections, however, point out five more incidences of advance payments (dating back to 2004-2008), which were never reconciled properly.
Interestingly, the audit also objects to the promotion of the horticulture director, noting that he came to the authority on deputation in PBS-17. How was he promoted in Grade-19? The DG was not competent for granting such promotions. Thus, the additional payments of Rs22.33m be recovered from him, which he got as benefit of next two grades of illegal promotion.
The same application accuses him of getting a new car from one of the contractors, who was given some undue concessions.
“What this correspondence represents is just a tip of the iceberg,” says Iftikhar Ahmad – former vice chairman of PHA. The authority has deep divisions among its employees; everyone is against everybody. In next round of correspondence, one may get similar complaints against the accusers of this round.
“We realised these divisions and worked actively to keep them under the check. However, as governance gets weaker (as shown in posting of four director generals in last 17 months), those divisions are resurfacing, creating troubles for working of the authority. The trouble is that employees were brought in from three different departments – LDA, Municipal Corporation and Tourism Development Corporation – to form the PHA; they never jelled as a team. Those divisions always persist at subterranean level and resurface when find release. There is hardly any project, which is complaints or inquiry-free. In such circumstances, more appropriate question is where is the entire organisation heading for rather than what are a few employees doing, he concludes.
Published in Dawn, January 30th, 2020