PM has been informed that the Secretary of Communications, who also serves as the NHA’s Principal Accounting Officer, has the responsibility of acting as a watchdog and ensuring transparency in all engineering, financial, and administrative concerns.
The intention of giving an allegedly corrupt person dual control over the positions of Secretary Communications and Chairman of the NHA appears to be to bulldoze through all Rules, Regulations, and Sops by removing any obstacles that might stand in the way of financial gain.
On purported orders from the principal secretary to the prime minister, the establishment division has handed dual charge to Shahid Ashraf Tarar, Jawad Rafique Malik, and Khurram Agha, all three BPS-22 PAS officers. At the NAB in Rawalpindi, references alleging corruption against all three are still pending.
With an executive board and highway council to oversee daily operations, the National Highway Authority is a corporate, autonomous organisation that was founded by an Act of Parliament in 1991. Making NHA autonomous was done to make it self-sufficient and least reliant on federal funding, while yet allowing for little governmental intervention.
A purposeful attempt to steal, seize, and hijack resources created by the NHA over the past three decades for the building, running, and managing of national highways, motorways, and cpec is today regarded as the appointment of PAS Officers in the NHA.
Through their dubious activities, PAS personnel appointed on deputation to NHA have given the PAS organisation a very poor name and ample reason for hostility.
Messer’s Tarar and his hand-picked team made a tidy sum out of the dubious concession agreement he signed by Shahid Ashraf Tarar, thanks to which the Lahore Islamabad Motorway Project was given to More Private Limited for 20 years. However, the department that was directly responsible for the development of Pakistan-NHA was forced to suffer a collosal revenue loss worth billions of rupees (2015-todate) as a result of the above senseless
Following his elevation to Chief Secretary Punjab, Jawad Rafique Malik showed even more generosity by continuing to grant the Islamabad-Peshawar Motorway to the same More Private Limited while oblivious to the NAB inquiry into the SaafPaani Company reference.
Bypassing the National Highway Council, PAS officers shared NHA’s money (fine collection) with the national highway and motorways police. This is only one example of how the officers have been incredibly kind when sharing NHA guaranteed revenue with their batch mates. Just in the last two financial years, NHMP has already received just over 5000 million rupees. They have been utilising it for their own welfare without any legitimate authority.
While straying from the established policy, pas officers were nevertheless able to provide their course mates stationed in NHMP with NHA guaranteed income in the form of matching grants.
The least bothered Khurram Agha recently started a new chapter in the financial stress that the indebted authority is already experiencing by agreeing to purchase and maintain the national highway and motorways police’s transportation fleet while departing from the established procedures.
Khurram Agha ignored the prior papers, observation, and advice available on record and continued to grant eight more nocs to the defaulter entity for the establishment of more commercial beats on the roads network with zero return to NHA. This was despite audit observation and advice of general manager internal audit being available on record regarding recovery of Rs. 20 billion rent in respect of NHA buildings in possession of NHMP from last 25 years.
To rectify all improper actions carried out during the previous eight years at NHA, the report emphasised that the role of the prime minister as president of the highway council must be restored.
According to the source, the PM has been urged to immediately revoke and remove the deployment of all PAS, PAAS, and officials from extraneous entities to NHA in favour of assembling a team of qualified engineers to help the agency get back on track.
