The Rs500 Million Line: How NAB’s Jurisdiction Actually Works

There is a number that decides whether Pakistan’s anti-corruption bureau can touch your case: Rs500 million. Below it, the National Accountability Bureau has no jurisdiction. Above it, the full machinery of accountability courts applies.

What almost nobody has followed is that this number is no longer fixed, that officials now estimate the real figure has crossed Rs800 million, and that NAB itself is arguing the threshold should be lowered rather than raised. Untangling that requires going back to 2022.

Where the threshold came from

The Rs500 million floor was introduced through the 2022 amendments to the National Accountability Ordinance 1999, passed by the PML-N-led coalition after the removal of the PTI government. The stated purpose was to keep NAB focused on large-scale corruption instead of being drawn into comparatively small financial disputes. The same package cut the terms of the NAB chairman and prosecutor general to three years and transferred pending inquiries below the threshold to other agencies.

Imran Khan challenged the amendments, arguing they were designed to benefit influential accused persons. The Supreme Court struck them down in September 2023. That did not settle it. In September 2024 a five-judge bench headed by Chief Justice Qazi Faez Isa — sitting with Justices Aminuddin Khan, Jamal Khan Mandokhail, Athar Minallah and Hasan Azhar Rizvi — allowed intra-court appeals, set aside the earlier judgment and dismissed the petition, holding that the 2023 ruling had not demonstrated how the amendments infringed any fundamental right. The amendments were restored.

What changed in March 2026

The National Accountability (Amendment) Act 2026, Act No. XIV of 2026, moved through Parliament with unusual speed. Introduced as private members’ legislation in the Senate by Senator Abdul Qadir, taken up in the National Assembly through a supplementary agenda, and given presidential assent the same day — hours before the incumbent chairman’s term was due to expire. Lt General (retired) Nazir Ahmed received a three-year extension.

The provisions that will outlast that extension are the technical ones.

Threshold indexation

The Rs500 million figure is adjusted annually in line with the inflation index published by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, starting 1 July 2022. The amendment is also deemed to have taken effect from the commencement of the Ordinance in 1999 — a legal fiction requiring courts to read the law as if the mechanism had always existed.

Section 4

Accountability courts’ jurisdiction extended from trials to trials and appeals.

Section 9

Accountability courts and the relevant high courts empowered to grant bail or order release under Sections 439, 496, 497 and 498 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.

New Section 32A

A second appeal against high court decisions in graft cases may be filed before the Federal Constitutional Court within 30 days.

The indexation problem

Indexation sounds administrative. It is not. Pakistan has run double-digit inflation for much of the period since July 2022, and compounded across successive fiscal years that materially changes the real value of Rs500 million. Officials estimate the indexed figure has now passed Rs800 million.

If that indexed figure governs jurisdiction, the consequence is immediate: pending inquiries, investigations and references involving amounts between Rs500 million and roughly Rs800 million would fall outside NAB’s ambit and face closure or withdrawal. A large number of live high-profile matters sit in exactly that band.

NAB has taken a position designed to prevent that. In an internal note issued to prosecutors and investigators after the March promulgation — prepared jointly by the Deputy Chairman and the Prosecutor General Accountability on the Chairman’s direction, following consultation with prosecutors from headquarters and every regional office — the bureau drew a line between the statutory threshold and the inflation-adjusted value of a liability.

The note holds that Rs500 million remains the jurisdictional benchmark, and that inflation adjustment applies only after a liability has been finalised. Once the adjusted figure is calculated, it is locked and does not fluctuate with subsequent annual movements in the index. NAB grounds this in the amendment’s statement of objects and reasons, which says the purpose of indexation is to keep the limit realistic and relevant over time — not, on NAB’s reading, to benefit accused persons or narrow the bureau’s reach.

This is an interpretation, not a ruling. Courts have not yet tested it, and the tension between a clause backdated to 1999 and an adjustment mechanism starting in 2022 is the kind of drafting problem that generates litigation for years.

The bureau wants the threshold cut

The most counterintuitive part of the story is that NAB is lobbying against its own protective ceiling.

Appearing before the Senate Standing Committee on Law and Justice in August 2026, Chairman Nazir Ahmed asked the government to withdraw the restriction preventing action against officials accused of corruption below Rs500 million. He argued the limit lets people structure their conduct beneath the line and escape prosecution, that cases below the threshold have simply migrated to the Federal Investigation Agency, and — in the line that carried — that a police station house officer now has more powers than a NAB investigation officer. An earlier draft had proposed cutting the threshold to Rs300 million.

He also offered a breakdown of where corruption sits that complicates the usual framing. By NAB’s own accounting, politicians account for about 6 per cent of corruption in Pakistan and government officials about 11 per cent, while the private sector — including what he called the sugar mafia — accounts for more than 45 per cent. The bureau, he said, is nonetheless pushed repeatedly towards political cases, which the media covers more aggressively.

What to watch

The first court ruling on whether indexation governs jurisdiction or only finalised liability.

Whether any bill to lower the threshold to Rs300 million is actually tabled.

How many references in the Rs500m–Rs800m band are quietly closed or transferred.

Early use of the new Section 32A second appeal to the Federal Constitutional Court.