Corruption in MUET: Govt grant worth Rs50m “stolen” by an employee

A case of financial corruption by an employee of reputable Mehran University of Engineering and Technology (MUET), Jamshoro has been exposed recently. The employee is said to have transferred a government grant worth Rs50 million to his bank account in 2017 and learned the Express Media.

Apart from that, it is also known that the employee has started a business with the stolen money.

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According to the Express Media reports, the former deputy director of the varsity’s finance department, Waqas Ali Channa, was posted at the MUET’s Shaheed Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto Campus in Khairpur, is said to be involved in the corruption scandal.

Moreover, the sources informed that other prominent people associated with the university’s administration were also the party to the crime. As per the law, government funds need approval by the relevant authority for transfer and withdrawal of money from the account.

However, when the matter came to fore, the university administration held Channa only responsible for the fraud and urged the provincial government to investigate the matter. Meanwhile, the Sindh Department of Universities and Boards wrote a letter to the anti-corruption department and requested it to investigate the varsity’s monetary anomalies.

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MUET Jamshoro’s vice-chancellor, Prof Mohammad Aslam Uqaili, advised the universities and board departments about the matter through a letter dated June 30, asserting that Channa had transferred the money from MUET’s Khairpur campus accounts to his account in a private bank, the sources informed.

While the incident in question took place in 2017, it came to the notice that during the intervening time, the Sindh government had even appointed Channa as the director of finance at the Shaheed Benazir Bhutto University of Technology and Skill Development, Khairpur. He was also given made in charge as the director of finance at the Begum Nusrat Bhutto Women University in Sukkur.

Whereas, it is also learned that the Sindh government has not taken any legal action against Channa as an investigation is currently underway.

When contacted for comment on the matter, the MUET Jamshoro VC said that the university had conducted a departmental inquiry against the said officer.

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“After thoroughly investigating the matter of financial corruption, the university has duly registered an FIR against the former deputy director of finance [Channa],” the VC said. “Besides, we have also been successful in recovering Rs10 million from the embezzled amount of Rs50 million. Channa has also issued a statement in which he has confessed his crime.”

When asked whether the university’s deputy director of finance was authorized to transfer such a huge amount of money from the university’s official accounts into his own without the approval of the vice-chancellor, Professor Uqaili said that the incident happened during the tenure of the pro-vice-chancellor (PVC) of the varsity’s Khairpur campus, Ghulam Sarwar. At the same time, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Rajput was the vice-chancellor of the university at that time.

“The PVCs of different campuses had the same authority as that of the vice-chancellor in financial matters, which continued until I took over as the VC. However, this does not mean that Sarwar was part of the fraud,” Uqaili stressed. “We are trying to obtain more details from the bank to get a clearer picture.”

Published in The Express Tribune, August 10, 2020.