NAB’s effective Anti Corruption Strategy starts yielding results: Chairman NAB

ISLAMABAD: National Accountability Bureau (NAB) Chairman Justice (Retd) Javed Iqbal on Thursday said anti graft watch dog devised productive strategy to eradicate corruption that has started yielding positive results.

In a statement, he said bureau’s major focus was to eradicate corrupt practices like money laundering, cases of cheating the public at large, willful bank loan defaults, misuse of authority and embezzlement of state funds.

Since NAB’s inception, one of NAB’s major achievements has been the recovery of around Rs.466.069 billion which was a great achievement as per the annual report of 2019 of NAB, he said.

“Starting from the year 2017 which can be called basically a year of reinvigoration of NAB, we have moved with new zeal and effort with all pillars of the organization including Operations, Prosecution, Human Resource Management, Training and Research and Awareness and Prevention have been reactivated,” he said.

The Chairman NAB said that NAB was a role model for the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) Countries. Pakistan was first Chairman of SAARC Anti-Corruption forum in order to have collaborative efforts for eradication of corruption on the basis of best practices.

NAB has also signed (MoU) Memorandum of Understanding with China to eradicate corruption.

He said that NAB for the last three years, has established over 55,000 Character Building Societies in universities/colleges to create awareness against corruption among students/youth which has proved very successful.

NAB has also established Prevention Committees throughout the country in order to identify loopholes and suggest ways and means in consultation with concerned departments to ease out their service delivery systems in order to address the problems of people at large.

He said that requests for early hearing of 1,230 corruption references would be filed in respective Accountability Courts so that people’s Rs 947 billion could be recovered from corrupt elements and deposited into national exchequer. Elimination of corruption was top most priority of NAB.

Transparency International (TI), Pakistan, World Economic Forum, PILDAT Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Mishal Pakistan have appreciated NAB’s corruption eradication efforts.