ISLAMABAD: The Senate’s Standing Committee on Law and Justice has termed illegal and unconstitutional the Federal Investigation Agency’s actions against the Sindh administration, saying it has no mandate to act against provincial departments.

However, the FIA claimed that some departments and officials of the provincial government were involved in terrorism because the money they were generating was used for financing terror. Therefore, the agency was taking action against them under the Protection of Pakistan Ordinance (PPO), it said during a meeting of the committee on Monday.

The FIA officials presented a document which described the origin and mandate of the agency. “The agency was established in 1974 by an act of parliament with a countrywide mandate except provincial departments and Federally Administered Tribal Areas,” it said.

“The agency has the mandate to investigate and prosecute the following offences: illegal immigration, human smuggling/trafficking, cyber crimes and intellectual property rights.”

The officials said that although the agency cannot take action against provincial departments, it was conducting its operations in Sindh, particularly Karachi, under the PPO and a notification had allowed it to do so.

The PPP’s Senator Saeed Ghani expressed displeasure over the FIA’s operation in Karachi.

“The FIA cannot interfere in Sindh’s provincial departments even under the PPO because it was formed through an act of parliament and in case of any amendment to its rules the agency will have to approach parliament again,” he said.

An FIA official said the agency would clarify its position and would be ready to fight its case if its actions in Sindh were challenged in a court of law.

NAB PERFORMANCE: The committee’s members from the treasury benches praised the performance of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), while those from the opposition reprimanded it.

Rawalpindi NAB Director General Zahir Shah informed the committee that about 80 per cent of the complaints were found false during scrutiny.

Senator Ghani criticised the bureau and urged it to change its procedure of entertaining complaints.

Replying to a question, the DG said the cases against Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif could not be pursued during his absence from the country and had later been withdrawn under the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO), but were being followed since his return in 2007.

He said former president Asif Ali Zardari had been tried in six cases and two of them had been disposed of. “However, NAB has filed an appeal in one of the disposed of cases,” he said.

The official said NAB was carrying out an investigation against former information minister Firdaus Ashiq Awan on the basis of a news report.

Published in Dawn, August 18th, 2015

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