PESHAWAR, Dec 19: Nazir Gul, an affectee of the Lead Cooperative Society scam, died here of Cancer the other day.
Gul had sent many applications to the president of Pakistan and chairman of the National Accountability Bureau to get his stuck-up money, Rs150,000, recovered, but he didn’t receive any response. Since he had no money, he could not arrange for the required treatment for his deadly disease.
A father of three, Gul is not the only affectee of the scam as dozens of others have been making pleas to successive governments for the last decade to recover their looted money to the tune of Rs23.3 million.
Like other members of the Lead Cooperative Society, Gul had deposited his life-long earnings in the account of the society, which deceived the members and disappeared.
A decade earlier, the Lead Cooperative Society was registered with the food, agriculture and cooperatives department in Islamabad. It offered lucrative a package of profit, thus catching attention of many, especially retired government employees.
Like Gul, who was a grade-11 assistant in the office of the NWFP advocate-general, many invested their hard earned money with the society.
In Peshawar, the total number of account holders was 162. The society had opened two offices in the city. The chairman of the society was Mohammad Afzal Qureshi and its directors were Tariq Mohammad, Nisar Mohammad, Farooq Azam, Mohammad Akhter Qureshi and others.
Initially, the society paid profit to the account holders. Towards the end of 1991, it stopped paying the profit on various pretexts. When the account holders raised hue and cry, the society chairman was arrested. He remained behind bars for quite some time before being released on bail.
An affectee said the chairman had declared the details of his property at the time of the society’s registration, which, he suggested, should be confiscated. He claimed that the chairman had paid Rs2.4 million for purchasing a vast piece of land.
But as he failed to deposit the rest of the amount, the amount was returned which, he added, was subsequently deposited with the Registrar Cooperative Societies, Islamabad.
The affectees demanded that the government should, at least, distribute those Rs2.4 million among them.