The top court has stayed investigation of the project by FIA till indefinite period.
ISLAMABAD: (UrduPoint/Pakistan Point News-June 3rd, 2020) The country’s top court extended stay for Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) to investigate Peshawar’s Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) project case here on Wednesday.
A SC three-member bench of the Supreme Court headed by Justice Umar Bandial heard the Peshawar BRT project case.
Justice Umar Atta Bandiyal, one of the judges, observed that the Supreme Court would examine the process under which the construction contract was granted.
“The court doesn’t want to keep the case under stay for long,” the judge observed. He also rermarked that they had to analyze specific things as judiciary including repeatedly redesigning the project on public money, delay in its completion, mistakes committed in it and transparency.
“Whether there is any conflict of interests in the BRT project?,” the top court asked. It also questioned that whether the project was launched without groundwork and that whether the provincial regime spent billions of rupees on an incomplete project.
The SC put off further hearing for an indefinite period over request by the KP government’s counsel.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Peshawar Development Authority on Dec 24, 2019 challenged the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) probe into under construction Rapid Bus Transit system (BRT) in the Supreme Court,.
Earlier, Peshawar High Court ordered FIA to probe into BRT, however, the KP government filed a petition in SC Peshawar Registry challenging the FIA's probe into BRT.
The provincial government had said that the SC had already ordered to halt NAB's investigation into the matter; therefore, the case could not be reopened.
On December 6, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government decided to approach the Supreme Court to stop FIA's ongoing probe into BRT project.
The bus project, which was launched in October 2017, was initially to be completed in April 2018. However, the first deadline was missed. Thereafter, the project managers kept changing the launch dates from May 20 to June 30 to Dec 31 in 2018 and March 23, 2019.
