LAHORE: The National Accountability Bureau (NAB) on Saturday raided top civil servant Fawad Hasan Fawad’s residence in Lahore.
The raiding party took into custody 30 USBs, two laptops and five mobile phones from the bureaucrat’s residence.
Moreover, the password for Fawad’s Blackberry mobile phone was also obtained.
Earlier on Friday, an accountability court Fawad into NAB’s custody for 14 days on physical remand link> .
Fawad is accused of pressuring Punjab Land Development Company (PLDC) chief executive officer (CEO) Tahir Khursheed and Project Director Ali Moazzam to cancel the Ashiana contract with Chaudhry Latif and Sons and award it to his blue-eyed contractor, Lahore Casa Developers—a proxy group of Paragon City (Pvt) Limited.
As a result, the government had to pay Rs5.9 million in compensation to the Chaudhry and Sons in 2013. In addition, the cost of the project had also escalated by billions of rupees due to the delay.
Further, he had allegedly concealed the inquiry committee report declaring the award of the contract to Chaudhry Latif and Sons as per the Public Procurement Regulatory Authority (PPRA) rules. NAB has already investigated former Punjab chief minister Shehbaz Sharif in this regard.
Listing the corruption charges, NAB officials claimed Fawad had wrongfully awarded the Ashiana contract to ‘favourites’, illegally awarded contracts for nine CNG stations at the behest of Sprint Energy, a subsidiary of JS Group, by preparing fake NoCs for transfer of sites from one district to another, and also worked in Bank Alfalah from 2005 to 2006, even though the Establishment Division had turned down his request to do so.
Moreover, while being the provincial health secretary, Fawad had acquired six mobile health units which were purchased at a higher-than-market rate.