Around 165,000 Pakistani students study abroad, but very few pay taxes in Pakistan, the NAB chief said.
ISLAMABAD:
National Accountability Bureau (NAB) Chairman Lt Gen (retd) Nazir Ahmad Butt has said the top accountability watchdog will approach Parliament with a request to reduce the current threshold of Rs 500 crore required for initiating action in corruption cases.
“NAB will ask parliament to lower this threshold as many have started planning corruption below Rs 500 million to evade prosecution,” the NAB chief said in his first press conference since taking charge of the organization in March 2023 on Tuesday.
After the overthrow of the PTI-led federal government in April 2022, the PML-N-led coalition government amended the National Accountability Ordinance (NAO) 1999, limiting the jurisdiction of the NAB to cases involving alleged corruption exceeding Rs 500 million.
During the briefing, the NAB chairman presented an assessment of the bureau’s performance and said that no other institution in the country had achieved such huge recoveries as the NAB.
He said that from its inception in 1999 to March 2023, NAB had recovered $3.15 billion. However, during his two-and-a-half-year tenure, NAB recovered a whopping $29.99 billion. These recoveries include cash recoveries of Rs 1,124 billion (around $4 billion), while the rest was recovered in the form of assets.
“In the last 26 years, the government provided NAB with Rs 62 billion, while the bureau recovered Rs 9 trillion, making its performance unmatched by any anti-graft agency in the world,” he said.
He regretted that those who loot Pakistan’s wealth invest their money in the United States, Europe, Canada and other countries, where no one questions them.
Around 165,000 Pakistani students study abroad, but very few pay taxes in Pakistan, he noted.
“These countries have become safe havens for laundered money,” he said, adding that even when the NAB requests data, it sometimes takes up to seven years to receive a response, and the information is often hidden under the pretext of protecting “politically exposed persons.”
