NAB Announces End of File-Based Real Estate System

The head of Pakistan’s National Accountability Bureau, Lt Gen (retd) Nazir Ahmed, has said that big changes are coming to the country’s real estate sector. He made these remarks informally to reporters in Islamabad.

According to Ahmed, the federal cabinet will likely take up a reform package within the next two months. The biggest change? The current file-based system in real estate will be done away with completely once the new rules are officially approved.

He said that under the new setup, developers will be directly responsible for their projects, a major shift from how things work today. He didn’t go into the finer details of the proposed rules, but the message was clear: the sector needs more accountability.

On the investigation front, Ahmed said several cases have been handed over to the FIA and provincial anti-corruption bodies. Cases involving sitting parliamentarians are still open, though he noted that NAB has quietly moved away from making public statements about them.

When asked about the IMF’s recent governance report on Pakistan, Ahmed called it baseless. He said that the IMF never gives any country a clean chit, suggesting the report shouldn’t be taken too seriously. He made similar remarks about Transparency International’s corruption index, questioning how a country as large as Pakistan can be judged based on a small survey sample.

The NAB chairman also claimed that recoveries in the past three months have hit record levels, though he gave no exact figures. He was careful to point out that every rupee recovered by NAB goes straight into the federal fund, none of it stays with the bureau.