Arrest of a town municipal officer and a TMC official is expected to be followed by more, with investigators said to be examining municipal, union council, revenue and education board accounts
MIRPURKHAS: The National Accountability Bureau (NAB) has arrested Town Municipal Officer Mir Sher Muhammad Talpur and Town Municipal Committee official Mumtaz Channa in Mirpurkhas over alleged financial irregularities, and more officials are likely to be taken into custody as the inquiry widens, according to sources familiar with the investigation.
The sources said further individuals had already been detained since the first two arrests, though their names have not been disclosed. NAB had not issued a public statement on the arrests by the time of publication, and neither of the two officials, nor anyone representing them, could be reached for comment.
The arrests have unsettled officials across the district’s local bodies, where people linked to the alleged irregularities are said to be weighing their legal options as word of the expanding probe spreads.
Several institutions under the lens
According to the sources, investigators are close to concluding inquiries into alleged losses to the national exchequer across a wide set of institutions. These include the Mirpurkhas Municipal Corporation, the areas that fell under the town municipal offices headed by Mir Sher Muhammad Talpur and Syed Khadim Ali Shah, several union councils and other local government bodies, the Mirpurkhas Board of Education and the district’s Revenue Department.
The allegations under review concern embezzlement of development and municipal funds and misuse of authority, the sources said. They did not give an estimate of the total amount involved, and the specific charges against each official have not been made public. The inclusion of an office in the inquiry does not mean that every officer who served there is accused of wrongdoing.
Once the current inquiries are complete, the pace of arrests is expected to pick up and the net is likely to reach other figures, the sources added.
A district with a recent record
Mirpurkhas, headquarters of the division of the same name and the commercial centre of a mango-growing belt, has already been at the centre of one of the province’s biggest education scandals this year.
In March, police in Mirpurkhas arrested staff of the Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education after a whistle-blower alleged that thousands of students had been given extra or passing marks in exchange for bribes. In April, Sindh’s Anti-Corruption Establishment registered a case against the board’s former controller of examinations, Anwar Aleem Khanzada, alleging corruption worth about Rs2.04 billion, including the issue of 1,078 matriculation and 1,461 intermediate certificates against payment. He was arrested and handed to the agency on physical remand.
That case was run by the provincial anti-corruption body and police. The involvement of NAB, which handles larger cases, marks a step up in the federal accountability effort in the district.
Why NAB’s involvement matters
Since amendments to the National Accountability Ordinance in 2022, NAB can only take up corruption or misconduct cases involving at least Rs500 million. The bureau said in August that this remains its basic jurisdictional test. If NAB is leading the Mirpurkhas inquiry, the combined value of the alleged irregularities is therefore likely to be substantial, though the bureau has not confirmed a figure.
NAB Chairman Nazir Ahmed Butt has argued that the threshold allows some officials to structure corruption below the limit, and the bureau has said it will ask parliament to lower it. Cases that fall below Rs500 million are left to provincial anti-corruption departments and ordinary courts.
Mirpurkhas is governed by a municipal corporation created in 2022 under Sindh’s local government law, with Mayor Abdul Rauf Ghori of the Pakistan Peoples Party in office since June 2023. Town municipal offices handle day-to-day spending on sanitation, streets, water supply and drainage, areas where residents of Mirpurkhas have long complained of poor services.
The view from Lahore
The Sindh arrests come as Punjab runs its own anti-graft campaign. In September, the provincial government set up a secret anti-corruption cell and activated a 1350 helpline, and officials said that within days complaints had led to arrests of officers, with the Food Department among the hardest hit. In Lahore, the municipal complaints system has also come under scrutiny over how much of it the public can actually see.
NAB’s own docket in Punjab remains busy with older, high-profile matters, such as the Pervaiz Elahi kickbacks case. Its moves against local government officers, as in Mirpurkhas, tend to draw less national attention but affect services residents use every day.
In Sindh, the provincial Public Accounts Committee has also been tightening oversight of spending by public institutions, including ordering checks on university canteens last month.
Public expectations
Residents of Mirpurkhas are now watching the investigating agencies closely. Citizens and civil society members want a transparent inquiry into the alleged embezzlement of public funds and misuse of authority, and action against everyone involved regardless of their position or political connections.
Whether the probe produces references in the accountability court, plea bargains or recoveries, or stalls as many local-level inquiries have in the past, will shape how much faith residents place in the process. NAB is expected to seek physical remand of the arrested officials, which would bring the first formal details of the case into the public record.
–Reporting by M Hashim Shar in Mirpurkhas; Editing by The Lahore Times
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