LAHORE: The federal Power Division has ordered a formal inquiry into alleged serious irregularities in the Grid System Construction (GSC) Circle of the Lahore Electric Supply Company, the wing responsible for building the grid stations that carry power into the city’s neighbourhoods.
According to sources, the inquiry covers projects worth billions of rupees, unusual delays in their completion, alleged misappropriation of material worth crores, and alleged theft of fuel from official vehicles. LESCO has assigned the inquiry to its Director of Monitoring and Surveillance and has been told to treat it as a priority.
The ministry has sent LESCO’s management the records of all the projects concerned. In line with the ministry’s instructions, LESCO has started an inquiry and assigned it to its Director of Monitoring and Surveillance. Alongside the construction delays, the inquiry will also examine allegations that fuel was stolen from official vehicles in the circle.
Grid stations are the link between the national transmission network and the local distribution lines that reach homes and businesses. When their construction falls behind, the existing stations and transformers carry more load than they were designed for. The consequences are familiar such as load-shedding that strained LESCO’s system in the heat and hours-long outages after transformer faults. Delays also slow new connections and upgrades, including for rooftop solar users already stranded by a shortage of net-metering (Green Meters).
The inquiry is the latest in a series of findings against LESCO’s management and governance. In July, the Auditor General of Pakistan’s performance audit of the company’s Board of Directors for 2021-22 and 2022-23 found that ineligible people with conflicts of interest had been appointed to the board, and linked the resulting weak oversight to financial losses of Rs51.9 billion over those two years.
In April, an internal investigation found that LESCO staff had been marking consumer complaints as resolved without doing any field work, falsifying location data on mobile applications to hide operational failures.
Separately, the Lahore High Court (LHC) has stayed a Rs60 billion compensation order against LESCO.
The GSC Circle inquiry is being run internally, by a directorate that reports to the same management whose projects are under examination. That is not unusual for a first-stage departmental inquiry, but it raises obvious questions about independence, especially given the audit findings on board governance. The ministry has not said whether it will share the findings, whether the matter could be referred to the Federal Investigation Agency or the National Accountability Bureau if criminal misappropriation is found, or which grid station projects are delayed and by how long. LESCO officials are not available to provide any details and have not commented publicly on the allegations.
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