NAB chief resignation

Aftab Sultan has walked out of the highly effective Workplace of the Chairman Nationwide Accountability Bureau — a rarity in our a part of the world. Sultan’s resignation as NAB chief had been accepted a number of days after hypothesis started that he wished to give up because of the strain on him to take actions that he discovered “unacceptable”. Sultan confirmed there was strain on him from the PDM coalition authorities, though he didn’t go into specifics. Nonetheless, hours after his resignation, former prime minister Imran Khan and his spouse have been advised to look earlier than NAB within the toshkhana case.

Sultan, a former bureaucrat with an LLM from the College of Cambridge, had a status for honesty, having been made OSD — a digital suspension — by former president Pervez Musharraf in 2002 for refusing to assist his sham referendum. Sultan is the one who’s concerned in getting ready the investigation report within the Financial institution of Punjab rip-off case and reportedly offended former prime minister Yusuf Raza Gilani and former president Asif Zardari by refusing to permit misuse of sure intelligence belongings or to share some delicate data with the Presidency, as he had made it loud and clear that he was solely legally certain to tell and advise the Prime Minister.

Sultan has additionally been credited in some circles for guaranteeing the survival of the Nawaz Sharif authorities by offering proof in opposition to a few of the alleged backers of the PTI’s 2014 dharna that continued for 126 days and solely culminated within the wake of the ugly APS assault. This final case is why some PML-N leaders have been reportedly beneath the misguided perception that Sultan — who was then serving as director common of the Intelligence Bureau — was loyal to them, when in actual fact, what he truly did was merely do his job truthfully, no matter who ended up benefitting from it.

Not like his predecessor, Javed Iqbal, who was repeatedly accused of utilizing NAB to assault and harass the then-ruling PTI’s opponents whereas defending the social gathering’s personal supporters from investigation or prosecution, Sultan refused to show the screws on PTI leaders or make circumstances go away for PDM members. That is even though Imran repeatedly tried to throw mud at Sultan, accusing him of involvement in bribing journalists and violating import guidelines. Unsurprisingly, no proof to assist these allegations was ever provided.

In his brief tenure as NAB chief, Sultan has been credited with shifting the anti-corruption watchdog’s focus to solely pursuing circumstances the place there may be strong proof, slightly than investigating outlandish claims and following a ‘responsible until confirmed harmless’ strategy as was finished by Iqbal and several other different of his predecessors, who would detain folks on flimsy proof for years. Nonetheless, given how politicised NAB has been since its formation, even when that is Sultan’s solely achievement in workplace, he’ll nonetheless go down as the most effective NAB chief ever.

Printed in The Specific Tribune, February 23^rd, 2023.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Fb, comply with @ETOpEd on Twitter to obtain all updates on all our day by day items.