ISLAMABAD, April 9: Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) Additional Director General Basharat Mehmood Shehzad on Tuesday said that the FIA should have the same access to government records as the National Accountability Bureau (NAB).
While briefing a meeting of the National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Interior, the FIA director also said that there were a lot of flaws in the Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Act 2010, as a result of which the agency was unable to achieve results.
Shehzad said that, in particular, records were not received on time and cases were left pending.
“FIA should have the same access to government records as NAB has,” he said, pointing out that amendments were required to the anti-money laundering law to ensure this.
Shehzad noted NAB had the authority to take records from any institution but if the FIA required records from a bank, they had to take permission from a sessions judge.
The FIA official said that this could take up to months and sometimes the sessions judge would in the end not grant permission to access the records.
A member of the NA standing committee on Tuesday said that if there was no limit to the authority of NAB, which he described as operating under a ‘black law’, FIA too should get the records.
He asked what difficulty the FIA faced if there was already a process for obtaining records. The FIA official responded by explaining that their investigations could be sped up if records that took six months to acquire were acquired in six days.
The FIA official also briefed the committee on benami and fake accounts. Shehzad said that in reality, no account was ‘benami’ as it was under someone’s name. He said that there were two types of accounts: fake and benami.
According to the FIA official, a fake account is registered to a person who has died while their account was still active. On the other hand, a benami account is one where the account holders’ transactions do not match their income.
In the case of benami accounts, the individual whose name the account is in is neither the beneficiary nor the operator of the accounts. Shehzad said it remains to be seen what punishment laws can impose on bank managers and staff who are involved in this activity.
He pointed out cases where accounts were opened in the name of unwitting of ‘chai walas’ [tea sellers] and ‘falooda walas’ [ice-cream sellers] who had never been to the bank. He noted that the complicity of bankers in opening such accounts could not be ignored.
The FIA official said that in anti-money laundering investigations, banks are supposed to report such accounts and transactions. He said that in previous years, close to 500 such cases were reported to relevant institutions.
Shehzad also asked why no action had so far been taken against the banks that were found involved operating benami accounts.-Sabah
