PESHAWAR: A man arrested by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) on the charge of running an illegal housing scheme here has filed a bail plea with an accountability court after the recent changes to the accountability law.

It is the first petition filed under the recently promulgated ordinance, which empowers the court to decide the bail matters under the accountability law.

Nauman Omer, who is owner of Cityscape Housing Limited, contended that his issue did not fall in the jurisdiction of the NAB after the promulgation of the National Accountability (2nd Amendment) Ordinance, 2021, early this month.

Following the establishment of the NAB through the National Accountability Ordinance (NAO), 1999, the accountability courts were not empowered to decide bail pleas of the arrested suspects, who had to approach the relevant high courts for release.

Petitioner held by NAB for owning illegal housing scheme

In the recently promulgated ordinance, drastic changes were made to the parent law empowering the accountability courts to free an accused on bail in a case, which could be tried by it.

According the bail petition filed through senior lawyer Lajbar Khan Khalil, the NAB, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, illegally initiated an inquiry against the petitioner on the basis of mere suspicions as there was no private victim in the present case.

The petitioner said his firm had launched a scheme by the name of City Oasis on the Peshawar Ring Road to be developed over 100 kanals of land in Landi Akhun Ahmad area.

He claimed that he had acquired certain pieces of land, which were accordingly developed and the possession of plots were handed over to those, who had already purchased their files.

The petitioner said on Oct 6, 2021, he was arrested by the NAB without going into the details of the case.

He contended that his case didn’t fall in the ambit of the NAO in view of the recent amendments to the law, which had ‘ousted the applicability of the law to private persons’.

The petitioner added that even otherwise, his case did not fall in the definition of cheating public at large as there was no one, who claimed to have been deprived of their money.

He said the housing scheme consisted of a limited number of plots and was to have a gated community.

The petitioner said the non-issuance of NOC for the scheme by the Peshawar Development Authority was a matter between the petitioner and the PDA and that specific procedure and penalty had been given in the PDA Act, 2017.

He said the PDA had got an FIR registered against him on Feb 3, 2021, under Section 35 of the PDA Act.

The petitioner said it was an established principle of law that a person could not be tried twice for the same offence and it would amount to double jeopardy.

He added that the only ground agitated against him by the NAB was the failure to obtain the NOC from the PDA, which was not the job of the bureau to look into, as there was inbuilt mechanism provided in the PDA Act for dealing with the issue.

Published in Dawn, October 17th, 2021