ISLAMABAD: An accused in the rental power projects (RPPs) scam case, Rana Mohammad Amjad, has turned approver against former prime minister Raja Pervez Ashraf and the accountability court has accepted the National Accountability Bureau’s (NAB) plea for deleting Mr Amjad’s name from the list of accused persons and adding him to the list of prosecution witnesses.

NAB filed an application in the accountability court to drop charges against Mr Amjad for being the crown witness since he had consented to testify against Mr Ashraf.

A former managing director of the Central Power Purchase Authority, Mr Amjad also headed the Pakistan Electric Power Company (Pepco).

The RPPs case is about private power companies that faced allegations of having received more than Rs22 billion mobilisation advance from the government to commission the projects, but failed to set up the plants. A few of them had set up the plants, but only after an inordinate delay.

Court accepts National Accountability Bureau’s plea for making ex-official prosecution witness in matter involving Rs22 billion

Former PM Ashraf is also an accused in the case for misusing his authority during his tenure as the minister for water and power to get approval from the Economic Coordination Committee of the cabinet for an increase in the down payment to the rental power companies from 7 to 14 per cent, amounting to about Rs22bn.

Several former ministers, including Mr Ashraf, Liaquat Jatoi and Shaukat Tareen, and former chairman of Wapda Tariq Hameed are among those whose names surfaced in the RPPs scam case. Apart from them, former federal secretaries of water and power and finance Salman Siddique, Shahid Rafi, Ashfaq Mehmood, Saeed Zafar and Ismail Qureshi were also named in the case.

Six Pepco chiefs — Anwar Khalid, Munawwar Baseer, Tahir Basharat, Khalid Irfan, Fazal Khan and Saleem Arif — also figure on the list.

NAB filed the application seeking the court’s nod to formally allow Mr Amjad to turn approver.

The National Accountability Ordinance empowers the NAB chairman to pardon an accused for becoming approver.

Allowing the co-accused, who offer to come clean and implicate their colleagues while securing a lighter sentence or freedom for themselves, is an accepted part of the legal system.

In the mid-18th century, such approvers were called “crown witnesses” in English courts.

In Pakistan, initially a term Sultani Gawah was used for crown witnesses. After amendments to the Evidence Law (Qanoon-i-Shahadat), the term approver or Waada Muaaf Gawah was introduced.

According to the counsel for ex-PM Ashraf, the prosecution introduced the approver in those cases where there was insufficient evidence against an accused person. “This is a matter between the prosecution, investigation agency and the court,” he said.

He said the defence had demanded the copy of the confessional statement of the approver along with other legal documents and the court had accepted the request.

He, however, claimed that the statement of an approver was comparatively not a strong piece of evidence.

The NAB prosecution during the course of arguments requested the court to accept the application for filing a supplementary reference.

Subsequently, the judge asked the prosecution to file supplementary reference by Dec 21.

Published in Dawn, December 11th, 2018