The Accountability Court in Hyderabad turned down Iqbal Z Ahmed’s bail request on Saturday. Ahmed is the head of Jamshoro Joint Venture Limited (JJVL), which is the country’s biggest maker of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). He was arrested along with his two sons and three other people.
After the accused were denied bail in the Rs29 billion corruption case involving a petrol scam and money laundering, they were nabbed and taken to Nara Jail by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB).
One of the people who were arrested outside of court was Ahmed’s sons, Faseehuddin Ahmed and Raziuddin Ahmed. Others who were taken were Qazi Humayun, Asim Iftikhar, and Salamat Ali.
It was in 2013 that the NAB began looking into the gas distribution scam. Ahmed and Salamat were caught in Lahore on September 4, 2019, and were then moved to Karachi.
In 2020, the NAB brought the case to the Accountability Court in Hyderabad against Ahmed, his kids, and other suspects.
Ahmed and the other suspects had earlier gotten bail from the Sindh High Court (SHC). However, at their hearing on Saturday, their lawyer, Advocate Farooq H Naek, told the court that his clients had taken back their SHC bails.
He asked the accountability court to let them go free on the same reasons that the SHC had let them go free.
The judge said that the accused would have to be jailed before he or she could be released on bail, so the request was turned down.
When it opened in March 2005 in the Jamshoro area, JJVL’s LPG extraction plant could handle 200 million standard cubic feet per day (mscfd). By October 2014, it could handle 345 mscfd. Because of the LPG scam and money laundering cases, the plant stopped running in June 2020.
In an April 2022 letter to former Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, Irfan Khokhar, Chairman of the LPG Industries Association, asked that JJVL’s operations be restarted to deal with the growing lack of LPG and keep costs from going up too much.
He said that the plant could produce 10,000 to 12,000 tonnes of LPG every month. The government had already lost about Rs50 billion because it had to close from June 21, 2020, to March 31, 2022.
After the summer rains and floods in 2022, former Sindh chief minister Syed Murad Ali Shah also wrote to the federal government in October 2022 to ask that JJVL’s gas supply be restored. This was because the province was severely short of LPG.
