Recently, the Founder of Hascol Petroleum Limited, the Pakistani oil and gas company, was arrested by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) in connection to an Rs. 54 billion scam.
According to reports by Dawn news, the FIA arrested the Founder and CEO of Hascol Petroleum, Imran ul Haque, for his alleged involvement in a fraud that caused a loss of Rs54 billion to the national exchequer.
According to the FIA Sindh’s chief, a total of 30 suspects have been booked in the case. The scam was committed between 2015 and 2020, during which NBP granted HPL bank loans and funded and non-funded financial facilities in violation of prudent banking laws and practices. This amounts to a criminal breach of trust, causing wrongful loss to the NBP and the national exchequer and wrongful gain to HPL.
NBP presidents and credit group officials increased Hascol’s credit line from Rs2bn to Rs18bn against weak securities. The NBP’s credit heads, Reema Athar and Irtiza Kazmi, were the key players in the episode. Ms. Athar was a director at Clover Pvt Ltd, a company owned by Saleem Butt, a co-accused, and also served as a director on the board of Fossils Energy, a subsidiary of Saleem Butt’s company.
The NBP opened fake letters of credit (LCs) worth Rs95bn for Hascol in favor of Byco petroleum, and several other banks opened non-product LCs to the tune of Rs54bn for Hascol. “No fuel was underlying for this quantum of LC, and these were opened only to increase the liquidity in Hascol,” said the FIA director.
Apart from the scam, the FIA is also looking into the possibility of tax evasion by Hascol of up to Rs5bn. In addition, through over-invoicing, Hascol and another company Vitol, an exclusive supplier of POL products to HPL, transferred $42 million illegally outside Pakistan. Hascol is also alleged to have siphoned off funds through fake contractors to Rs117 million.
The FIA claims that Haque and his associates manipulated the company’s financial statements to inflate profits and obtain loans from various banks. The investigation is still ongoing, and Haque is currently in police custody.
