PESHAWAR: Although five South Asian countries have signed the United Nations Convention Against Corruption, the scourge still remains a problem there, according to the Transparency International’s latest corruption perceptions index that viewed Sri Lanka as the “least corrupt” in the region with a ranking of 78, while Bangladesh was ranked 158, India 88, Nepal 117 and Pakistan 144, suggesting a high level of corruption.
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Categories: Corruption · News Items · Pakistan
LAHORE, Nov 26: The government has not been able to move against those responsible for the stock market crash as they enjoy backing of powerful people within the system.
This was said by Omer Sarfraz Cheema of the Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaaf (PTI) while addressing a press conference here on Sunday.
The PTI information secretary said the stock exchange crash and sugar crisis were the two biggest scandals in the history of the country which affected almost everyone. But those responsible went free because of their political value in the system of governance.
He urged the chief justice of Pakistan to take suo motu notice of both the scandals and punish the culprits.
The people had been severely hit by price hike, lawlessness, unemployment and poverty, but the government was spending millions of rupees on advertising fake development projects, he said.
Mr Cheema alleged that the government was also using public money for political bribe instead of spending it on rehabilitation of the people and solving their problems.
“It is consoling people with meaningless news like expanding cellular telephone markets and foreign exchange reserves. No one in the world takes the former as a development indicator and the latter has not been able to serve masses in any way.”
He said real development could take place only if the country had democratic system. Independent media disseminated such scandals quickly pre-empting any investment in a country like Pakistan. The government would have to understand this fact if it wanted to attract foreign investment, he said and added that it would have to clean itself before expecting any investment.
The PTI leader said the city wore a clean look during the last three days to welcome the Chinese president which showed that resources were available, but priorities were not right.
The opposition, he said, must get together to liberate the country of corrupt rulers.
Source: Dawn
Categories: Corruption · News Items · Pakistan
29 – 9 – 2006
The authorities in Islamabad have many ways to ensure the right result in elections. Irfan Husain tells some tales from the polling booth.
The circumstances surrounding the destruction of a madrasa in Bajaur which killed up to eighty-five people on 30 October 2006 demonstrate yet again the tricky nature of President Pervez Musharraf’s current balancing-act. In particular, the involvement of the United States in the assault, and the nature of the protests in its aftermath, reveal Musharraf to be caught between the hammer of Washington’s demands and the anvil of his people’s rising anger.
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Irfan Husain is a columnist with Dawn newspaper in Pakistan.
Categories: Articles & Reports · Corruption · Dictatorship · Elections 2007 · Politics
ISLAMABAD, Nov 21: The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has summoned the governor of the State Bank and president of the National Bank of Pakistan (NBP) to brief it on Wednesday about their policy of writing off loans.
The committee expressed concern over the fact that numerous influential defaulters were rescheduling and taking new loans from the financial institutions with impunity.
Finance Secretary Tanvir Ali Agha said continuous intervention of the government in the affairs of the public sector banks was responsible for the chronic problem, which must be checked to save the institutions from the onslaught of wilful defaulters.
PAC member Syed Qurban Ali Shah said the NBP had written off Rs18 billion loans to the owners of a tobacco company. It was not clear from the NBP’s list of defaulters whether they had got loans from the National Development Finance Corporation (NDFC), the Industrial Development Bank of Pakistan (IDBP) or some other institutions now merged into the NBP, he said.He alleged that the owners of the company had taken loans of billions of rupees in the name of their employees and fake companies in the 1980s and later refused to pay back the loans.
They were arrested by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) and then released mysteriously after agreeing to pay Rs1.2 billion, he said.
“Nobody knows how much they owed to the NDFC and how much was written off or waived in settlement with NAB. The committee should summon all details in this regard,” he argued.
The committee took serious notice of the NBP’s move of sanctioning a Rs410 million loan to a textile mill in 2000 in breech of procedure. The loan was provided by the NDFC.
“I wonder whether there is any law in this country to check defaulters and many industrial giants have been getting their loans written off over the past four years,” said member Rai Mansab Ali Khan.
Full Story: Dawn (22nd Nov 2006)
Categories: Corruption · Economy · News Items · Pakistan
