ISLAMABAD: National Accountability Bureau (NAB) chief Justice (retd) Javed Iqbal has said corruption is one of the major hurdles in the way of prosperity and progress of the country.
This came in a statement issued on Friday. He said corruption is the mother of all evils, which undermines development and deprives people of their due rights.
“Considering these facts, National Accountability Bureau (NAB) was established in 1999 as Pakistan’s apex anti-corruption organisation which is assigned with the responsibility of elimination of corruption and corrupt practices and recovers looted money from the corrupt and deposits it into national exchequer,” he said.
He said NAB operates under the National Accountability Ordinance 1999 which was extended to whole of Pakistan including FATA and Gilgit-Baltistan. “Today, eradication of corruption is the top most priority of NAB and all steps are being taken to root out corruption with an iron hand,” he added.
He shared that NAB was committed to eradicating corruption by adopting “accountability for all” policy.
The bureau chief said that NAB was appreciated by SAARC countries. He added that it was lauded by all reputed national and international organizations like PILDAT, Mishal Pakistan, Transparency International and World Economic Forum.
NAB with improved infrastructure and rationalized workload for efficient, effective and expeditious disposal of cases is putting a maximum limit of 10 months.
He said that NAB had established its first Forensic Science Lab (FSL) in NAB Rawalpindi which has facilities of digital forensics, questioned documents and fingerprint analysis.
“NAB is the first Chairman of SAARC Anti-Corruption Forum which is great achievement for Pakistan due to NAB efforts,” the chairman said.
NAB has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with China for cooperation in the field of anti-corruption.
With regard to China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the cooperation would boost confidence in projects undertaken as signing of MOU between Pakistan and China is specially significant in the backdrop of increasing economic and trade cooperation between Pakistan and China with the mutual resolve to work in a fair, impartial and corruption-free environment in order to share their experiences to eradicate corruption.
NAB had devised a state of the art Monitoring and Evaluation System (MES) which had introduced in order to measure the effectiveness of performance of all regional bureaus of NAB which would help in enhancing the overall performance of operational, prosecution, monitoring and evaluation divisions of NAB, the Chairman concluded.
