The executive board of the Federal Government Employees Housing Authority (FGHEA) apparently decided to secure pricey plots for themselves in the posh housing sectors of Islamabad’s F-14 and 15 sectors.
Minutes of the executive board meeting, available with Dawn suggest that all members unanimously decided to have one kanal plot each. However, they did not include their names in the list placed on the FGEHA website that had 4,723 allottees, among them the chief justice and other judges of the Supreme Court.
According to the summary of the minutes of the August 17 meeting related to the allotments of 4,723 plots to judges, bureaucrats and journalists, the executive board members in a subsequent meeting “unanimously decided that the executive board members be considered against 1 percent quota of current schemes, reserved for the employees of the Ministry of Housing and Works, subject to availability in the corresponding quota and upon submission of a formal application for a particular scheme and membership drive.”
This decision, however, is against the observations of the parliament’s Public Accounts Committee.
In its August 23 meeting, the PAC had observed that “allotment on quota basis under federal government employees is also unjustified as all the members of housing authority have equal rights.”
The summary of the executive board meeting, which was circulated among members since last week, said that the plots might be allotted to them on “completion of mandatory one year as a board member and a minimum of five-year service in the federal government.”
In essence, the executive board allowed ‘fast-track’ allotment of plots to its own members, contrary to the criteria set for such allotments through seniority basis.
FGEHA spokesman Chaudhry Mohammad Irfan said plot allotments to members was a service benefit. He said the board had decided to give members priority to avail plots in the new sectors.
IHC Chief Justice Athar Minallah had suspended the allotments to the judges of subordinate judiciary and on September 13 suspended all allotment of 4,723 plots to senior bureaucrats and top judges.
The IHC also suspended balloting of the plots in sectors F-14 and F-15 till the next hearing, fixed for October 14, through an interim order passed on an appeal against a single-member bench directive to the FGEHA to consider around 30,000 applicants who had been waiting for allotment in sectors G-13 and G-14 for a decade.
