The Supreme Court’s September 15 ruling declaring some amendments made to the accountability law in 2022 null and void appears to have breathed a new life into accountability courts as the anti-corruption watchdog has started transferring cases of alleged corruption back to them .Sources said more than 100 cases, along with the relevant record, have been returned to Karachi’s five accountability courts by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) in pursuance of the apex court judgment. However, they added, some of the courts sent the cases back to the bureau citing some technical issues.
They explained that letters regarding the return of cases to the registrars of the accountability courts were sent by NAB prosecutors instead of the bureau’s director general to whom the courts had forwarded the cases.
Official statistics show that a total of 187 references of corruption were returned by Sindh’s accountability courts, both to NAB and to various other courts due to lack of jurisdiction following the amendments made to the National Accountability Ordinance, 1999.Of these, 109 cases were returned by five accountability courts in the port city, while 28 by Hyderabad’s three courts and 50 by the sole functional accountability court in Sukkur.
The corruption cases that were returned in the wake of the accountability law amendments include those against politicians, former ministers, bureaucrats, businessmen, property developers and others. The cases were either directly forwarded to the provincial anti-corruption or banking courts by the accountability courts or to the NAB director general to file them before relevant forums.
