ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court wants a complete picture of duties and levies recoverable by the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) from pending disputes in different customs tribunals in the missing Nato containers scam, in which recoveries have not been halted.

A three-judge bench, headed by Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, on Friday ordered the Federal Board of Revenue to submit by Monday a complete list of the amount the board had to recover from the litigations.

It also directed the revenue department to submit details of the status of the adjudications on missing container cases.

The bench was hearing a case relating to import of contraband items under the garb of food supplies meant for the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.

Advocate Rana Shamim, representing the FBR, told the court that about 7,972 complaints had been registered in the missing containers case.

On March 28, 2012, the court had directed the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) and the FBR to conduct ‘fair’ investigations and expedite recovery of the financial losses on the basis of the Jan19, 2011 report of Federal Tax Ombudsman Dr Shoaib Suddle. The report had suggested whopping losses of approximately Rs55 billion over the past four years because of pilferage of containers entering Pakistan under the Afghan Transit Trade (ATT) accord.

Had the FBR collected the duties and levies, the country’s annual budgets would not have gone in deficit, the chief justice said, adding that taxes and duties amounting to billions of rupees were being withheld only because the revenue department was not interested in collecting them.

“This is a classical case for the FBR,” the chief justice observed while pointing towards the scam discussed in the FTO report. He drew the attention of the FBR to the flooding of markets with smuggled goods and said it had led to collapse of the local industry.

The court expressed dissatisfaction with the performance of the NAB and said misconstruing the earlier order, it had initiated a fresh investigation into the scam instead of moving references against the accused.

The apex court clarified the order by directing the NAB to finalise references against the accused, ‘instead of sitting over them’. The NAB has to move references in the accountability courts.

During the proceedings Additional Prosecutor-General Rana Zahid Mehmood and NAB Regional Director-General Wajid Durrani appeared in the court and said a fresh inquiry had revealed a matching entry at the ports of entry and return of a number of containers carrying foreign goods that had crossed the border into Afghanistan.

Therefore references were not sent against the accused, identified in the FTO report, they said.

The NAB was asked to submit a comprehensive report in the court after a fortnight.