The persons who strike plea bargain have to get penalties according to the law, National Accountability Bureau (NAB) Chairman Javed Iqbal said on Saturday.

Such persons not only confess to their crime but also return the looted money, he said, adding that corruption is the mother of all evils it creates hurdles to national developments.

The establishment of NAB was aimed at recovering looted money from the corrupt and depositing it in the national exchequer, the bureau chief added.

Javed Iqbal listed the bureau’s feats saying that NAB nabbed big fish, recovered the Rs487billion from them and deposited it in the national exchequer. The NAB chief revealed in January last that it recovered Rs150 billion looted money in 2019. 

The bureau is a focal department under the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC), and Pakistan is a signatory of UNCAC convention, he added.

Chairing a performance review meeting, he talked about the Combine Investigation Team (CIT) system and Monitoring and Evaluation System (MES) to improve its performance. He also mentioned setting up special complaint cells at NAB HQ and all regional bureaus.