HYDERABAD: The National Accountability Bureau (NAB) has expressed its interest in launching an investigation into the Right Bank Outfall Drain-II (RBOD) project corruption case whose interim challan had been submitted to court of special judge anti-corruption (provincial) by the Anti-Corruption Establishment (ACE) a couple of months ago.
NAB approached the ACE and informed it that it wanted to investigate the RBOD-II case involving Rs4.482bn misappropriation by senior and junior project officials.
Sindh ACE director Sohail Qureshi confirmed to Dawn that NAB had written a letter to ACE a few days back informing it of initiating inquiry into the case. It was now up to the anti-corruption court to decide whether it would like to hold trial in the case or transfer it to NAB. It was now the court’s domain, he said.
According to a special public prosecutor, the judge has already directed the ACE’s officers to submit final challans of case and the case was fixed for hearing on Sept 19 when the investigating officer was required to submit challans in three cases.
The ACE had lodged two cases in Jamshoro and one in Thatta district after an inquiry. A departmental inquiry was also conducted by irrigation department’s chief engineer Zahid Shaikh against RBOD-II project officials. Later, the ACE stepped in to conduct criminal investigation into the case after Shaikh’s inquiry.
Munawwar Bozdar, the then project director (now retired), Waqar Qadri and Imran Shaikh, then superintending engineers (SEs) were accused in all three cases. Besides the three, other co-accused included 19 contractors and as many officials including accountant, assistant executive engineers and executive engineers. All the accused have obtained pre-arrest bail.
The breakup of Rs4.482bn showed that a fraud of Rs575.306m was mentioned in FIR No 4/20 and Rs379.744m in FIR 5/20 of Jamshoro ACE and Rs527.214m Thatta vide FIR No1/20. ACE claimed that the amount was fraudulently and illegally drawn by the accused in collusion with contractors and companies.
They had prepared bogus bills of flood-fighting works in 2017-18 and 2018-19 without vetting by the project support monitoring team (PSMT) but the site inspection by ACE officials revealed that the works had not been executed at all, according to FIRs.
The amount of Rs4.48bn was shown to have been utilised in 2017-18 and 2018-19 during flood emergency although no floods were reported. The accused officials were said to have cancelled works of contractors to whom they had awarded previously and then they had moved the courts against it.
The project cost (PC-I) of RBOD-II was revised in 2017, raising the cost to Rs61.985bn. It was revised twice. Initially, it was revised from Rs14bn to Rs29bn after work on the project started in 2001 and now pending or new works were to be carried out as per Rs61.985bn PC-I approved by the federal government.
A steering committee with Chief Secretary Sindh Mumtaz A. Shah as its head and representatives of Frontier Works Organisation (FWO) and others as its members oversees the RBOD-II project.
FWO is the executing agency of the project and its liabilities are to be cleared.
PD changed
About two decades have passed but the project remains incomplete to date. It started in January 2001 at a cost of Rs14bn with Bashir Dahar as its first PD. Since then it had been hit by cost overruns and frequent change of PDs. PD Sardar Shah has been changed just a few days back and a new officer will take charge soon.
RBOD-II is to be connected through Indus link in Sehwan with Main Nara Valley Drain which is RBOD-I. The RBOD-III was built in Larkana district. The 273km-long RBOD-II starts from Deh Karampur in Sehwan taluka and is designed to take 3,500 cusecs of effluent from Sindh and Balochistan to Gharo creek in Thatta coastal area to save Manchhar Lake from getting toxic waste.
Published in Dawn, September 17th, 2020