ISLAMABAD: In its drive to recover outstanding electricity dues, the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) is facing over 600 fresh litigations due to fictitious billing by power distribution companies (Discos), Dawn learnt on Thursday. During investigations against alleged defaulters, the NAB came to know that more than 80 per cent bills were bogus or fictitious.

“When we took action according to the preliminary information provided by the Discos, a number of accused were found innocent and they moved courts against NAB,” spokesman for the bureau Ramzan Sajid said.

At the start of a joint campaign launched by NAB and the water and power ministry, the bureau was informed that total recoverable dues amounted to Rs112 billion and the number of defaulters was said to be 230,000 across the country, he said.

“The Ministry of Water and Power vide its letter No PF-05 (030/2012 dated March 8, 2013) asked NAB to assist in recovering overdue bills from defaulters amounting to Rs112bn. Lists provided by Discos later reduced the amount to Rs76.9bn ,” Mr Sajid said.

Under the drive, the Discos provided lists of defaulters to the bureau and when it found that the lists were inaccurate, it asked the chief executive officers of the companies to sign the list, otherwise no action would be taken on them.

Interestingly not a single authentic list was approved or signed by any Disco head.

“We have sent many reminders to the Discos to sign the lists but they have not replied,” the NAB spokesman said. He said the bureau detected bogus billing and fake billing (without mentioning names of consumers and without having proper address of the connections). Mr Sajid also said NAB approached the CEOs to provide final lists of defaulters but most of the Discos failed to provide even these lists.

NAB would take punitive action under National Accountability Ordinance (NAO) 1999 in case of non-compliance by the Discos, he said. He, however, added that NAB had so far recovered Rs1.5bn during its campaign against the defaulters.

The government believes that non-recovery of dues is the major cause of electricity loadshedding and circular debt in the country.

The government has now given the task of recovering the dues to the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA). The FIA in turn has sought information from the NAB to benefit from its experiences and the agency has been apprised about fictitious billing by Discos to save innocent consumers from any inconvenience.

It was for the first time in its 13-year history that NAB went after utility bill defaulters even though it has been handling a number of high-profile corruption cases.

Former NAB chairman retired Admiral Fasih Bokhari had formed special cells in all regional headquarters of the bureau to deal with the issue.