Editor’s note: The Prosecution failed to establish a case in the Courts of Law, as such, all the accused sent up for trial in this case have been acquitted.

KARACHI, April 12: An anti-corruption court on Friday granted interim pre-arrest bail to the former commerce secretary in a multi-million-rupee land scam case till April 29.

Former secretary of the ministry of commerce Suleman Ghani along with the then federal commerce minister and senior leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party, Makhdoom Amin Fahim, and four others has recently been charge-sheeted for their involvement in financial embezzlement during the purchase of land for the National Insurance Company Limited (NICL) in violation of the procurement rules in August 2009.

The former secretary along with his counsel appeared before the court on Friday and moved a pre-arrest bail application.

The in-charge judge of the special federal anti-corruption court-II, Sanaullah Khan Ghory, granted interim pre-arrest bail to the applicant against the surety bond of Rs500,000 till April 29 and issued a notice to the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) with a direction to argue the bail plea on next hearing.

The court granted interim pre-arrest bail on April 10 to Amin Fahim till April 29.

On April 1, the FIA submitted a much-delayed supplementary charge-sheet, around a week after the departure of the PPP-led coalition government, against the PPP leader, the former secretary, two former directors of the NICL Amin Qasim Dada and Javed Syed and private persons Khalid Anwar and Amir Hussian and showed them as absconders.

The court accepted the FIA report and issued arrest warrants for the absconders.

Meanwhile, the court reissued on Friday non-bailalbe arrest warrants for the remaining four absconders till April 29.

According to the supplementary charge-sheet, the then management of the NICL through consultancy support service estimated the cost of the land in question at Rs92.5 million per acre while the FIA through revenue department estimated the same Rs40 million per acre while Nespak, a valuation firm, estimated it at Rs41.26 million per acre.

During the investigation it was revealed that the sale amount crossed Rs900 million and the money landed in the joint account of absconding accused Khalid Anwar (front man of now deceased Zafar Saleem, a government servant of grade-20) and Khawaja Akbar Butt and was distributed among the suspects, it added.

The FIA placed 72 witnesses in the new charge-sheet, but did not charge-sheet Zafar Saleem and Athar Naqvi (both deceased) for trial while directors of the NICL Syed Hur Riahi Gardezi and Syed Naveed Hassan Zaidi and private suspects Khawaja Akbar Butt and Syed Iqbal Hussain were shown as accused on bail.

The supplementary charge-sheet was filed around two years after the submission of an interim charge-sheet in which the then chairman of NICL Ayaz Khan Niazi and some other senior officials of the company and privates persons were named as accused.