ISLAMABAD, May 25: Despite insistence of the audit department, a sub-committee of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) here on Thursday showed reluctance to refer the Kamra grid station scam, in which an army brigadier is allegedly involved, to the National Accountability Bureau (NAB).

The brigadier, who is now retired, allegedly paid Rs20.278 million extra to a private company for the installation of grid station and in return received Rs12million in kickbacks.

Ruling party MNA, Col (Retd) Ghulam Rasool Sahi, who headed the two-member sub-committee on defence production, with PPP MNA Chaudhry Qamar-uz-Zaman Kaira as member, met here to investigate the Aeronautical Complex Kamra Grid Station scam. The sub-committee, however, did not differ with the point of view of the audit representative.

The audit representative stressed that the law ministry had clearly stated in its recommendations sought by the sub-committee that NAB could proceed against retired army officers involved in corrupt practices during their services under Section 9 of the NAB Ordinance 1999.

The sub-committee observed that it did not differ with the audit’s point of view, but wanted that the ministry for law, justice and human rights should give directions in black and white whether to send the case to NAB. By doing this, the sub- committee, actually provided more time to accused to refund the amount before the NAB stepped in.

Mr Sahi also directed Maj Gen Tariq Saleem Khan, additional secretary of the ministry of defence production to convey the sense of the committee to the accused, Brig (retired) Zulfiqar Ali Shah, and pursue him to refund the embezzled amount as directed by the AGP and court of inquiry.

Otherwise, the case would be forwarded to NAB. Mr Sahi, who had been very proactive in the previous meetings of the PAC on Thursday seemed too lenient to be ignored by the participants of the meeting.

Maj Gen Tariq Saleem Malik, who represented the ministry of defence production, said that inquiry was initiated on the directives of AGP after noticing a huge difference in contract amount for the identical 132 KV grid stations to a private company in Kamra Complex (Rs 60.50 million in 1995) which had completed the same grid station at Heavy Mechanical Complex Taxila for just Rs40 million in 1994.

He said that the court of inquiry had found that two officers, Brig Zulfiqar Ali Shah and Section Officer M. Younis were involved in awarding the contract to the private company, AEG International, and had received Rs8.950 million and Rs3.838 million respectively in kickbacks from the contracting company.

The inquiry also directed departmental action besides recovery of Rs2.53 million of tax evasion against seven other officers included Maj Basir Ali Sadiq, M Ashraf Bajwa, Shaukat Hayat, Nasir Akhtar Shafi, Ghulam Ilyas, Ijaz Ahmed and Maqsood Khan.

The court of inquiry and AGP had recommended GHQ to initiate disciplinary action against the culprits besides recovering the embezzled money but the GHQ expressed its inability stating that since the officers had been retired from the army service, it could not take any action against them.