The Lahore High Court (LHC) on Wednesday accepted the bail application of senior PPP leader Qasim Zia, in a fraud case pertaining to Rs80 million.The National Accountability Bureau (NAB) on August 8 had arrested Zia, who is also an Olympics gold medalist and former president of the Pakistan Hockey Federation (PHF), on charges of committing fraud through his brokerage house. A two-member bench of LHC comprising Justice Mehmood Maqbool Bajwa and Justice Farrukh Gulzar heard the bail plea filed by Zia and ordered his release while accepting the application. Detaining somebody on an allegation of misappropriating public money only to strike a deal later suggests that the exercise of accountability is either being used to victimise somebody on political grounds, or that it is being turned into an informal recovery drive to elevate the amounts they can show to have recovered.The process of accountability as it is conceived in the NAB Ordinance contains a set of exit doors for the accused to pay up a portion of the funds allegedly embezzled and get off spending time in jail.These exit doors are used quite liberally, and in July a sceptical Supreme Court even demanded that NAB submit a breakdown of how much of the Rs256bn it claimed to have recovered from persons accused of corruption was genuine recovery and how much a settlement under the terms of these exit doors.The first principle in accountability is due process, which means innocent until proven guilty. This entails careful framing of the charges so that recourse to bargains, either during the inquiry or investigation stage, should be used only in extraordinary circumstances.
pk.shafaqna.com
