ISLAMABAD: It seems politicians are not only impressed with the working of military courts but also with the military`s real estate entity the Defence Housing Authority (DHA).

During a meeting of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on Thursday, member Mohammad Junaid Anwar Chaudhry suggested that the Capital Development Authority (CDA) should follow the DHA model for getting possession of the acquire d land.

The suggestion came as the CDA chairman, Maroof Afzal, briefed the PAC members over the stalled Kurri Model Village project. He told the committee that during an initial survey there were about 1,100 occupants on the land but when the civic agency started the process of talcing possession of the acquired land in 2011, the number had reached 7,096.

He said most of the ownership claims made by the occupants were bogus as the FIA after a scrutiny of the affected people in 2013 cleared only 3,422 of them.

`Had the possession of the land taken soon af ter the initial survey, the number of the fake claimants would not have increased,` he said. However, when Mr Chaudhry suggested him to follow the DHA, the CDA chairman replied that the civic agency had its own rules which were even better than the DHA`s.

`There is a need for the strict enforcement of the rules as the CDA has better system than that of the DHA,` he claimed.

He, however, admitted that there were some loopholes in the land acquisition system of the CDA. He informed the PAC that the civic agency needed to amend its policy to avoid such issues.

Audit officials told the PAC that during the external auditing of the CDA accounts for the financial year 2012-13, the civic agency did not provide files of 21 key projects, including Light Emitting Diode (LED), Mass Transit Transport Scheme and Kurri Model Village.

In reply, the CDA chief told the committee that the then chairman Farkhand Iqbal removed these files from the CDA record and took them away when he was posted out of the civic agency. He said the FIA registered a case against Mr Iqbal and detained him for over a month. He said the matter was also in the notice of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, adding the CDA had reconstructed some of the files and handed them over to the audit officials.

At the very outset, PAC member Sardar Ashig Hussain Gopang said Auditor General (AG) Akhtar Buland Rana never attended the proceedings of the parliamentary committees.

He asked if the proceedings of the committees were valid in the absence of the AG. Director General Audit Maqbool Gondal replied that the absence of AG had nothing to do with the validity of the PAC`s proceedings as his (AG`s) subordinates were representing him.