A senior Pakistani bureaucrat was caught on camera stealing the wallet of a member of a Kuwaiti delegation, according to a report on newspaper Dawn.
The Kuwaiti delegation was on a visit to Pakistan to discuss investment plans in the country.
It was only after the members of the visiting Kuwaiti delegation lodged a strong protest prompting examination of the relevant CCTV footage, that the grade-20 officer of the Pakistan Administrative Services Group, deployed at the Finance Ministry and was caught in the act.
The official was identified as Zardar Haider Khan, Joint Secretary of Investment and Facilitation. According to reports, he is the 13th common DMG officer in the Islamabad Secretariat, according to a report in TimesNow.
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“All officers of the Ministry of Industries and Economics Affairs Division, as well as other participants, were shocked when the head of the Kuwaiti mission complained about the incident,” said a Pak Finance Ministry official, according to the report.
“This is a very unfortunate development that has brought a bad name to the country as well as the officers working here,” he added.
The act has become a major embarassment for the country which is seeking to rebrandish itself with potential investors as Naya Pakistan under Prime Minister Imran Khan, to attract foreign investment into the country and stabilise the country's debt ridden economy.
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When Pakistan's Information Minister Fawad Chaudhary was asked about the incident at a press briefing, he blamed the "moral training" of previous regimes, saying most of the present bureaucrats had got their "moral training" during the previous governments, according to the Dawn report.
In the video, which has become viral on social media, the bureaucrat can bee seen putting the walltet, which was laying on the table, into his pocket in the empty hall of Economic Affairs Division.
The officer had denied any involvement in the incident when he was first appriachged by officers, but relented after he was shown the CCTV footage of the incident, the report said.
The issue of theft came to surface after a member of the Kuwaiti delegation lodged a complaint with Pakistani officials regarding his missing wallet containing a handsome amount of Kuwaiti dinars.
After the wallet was recovered and the Kuwaiti officials were informed about the same, they demanded to know the identity of the culprit, to which Pakistani officials were hesitant and tried to assure the Kuwaitis of legal action against the culprit.
However, the angry Kuwaiti delegates insisted on knowing the identity of the person who had stole the wallet, and were even shown the CCTV footage of the incident as well, according to the report.
