The 2020 Inquiry Report That Was Buried: What It Said and Who Stopped It

The most thorough documentation of Pakistani IPP corruption ever assembled, suppressed within weeks of completion. What was inside, who was named, and the phone call that buried it.

By Asad Baig · Lahore · April 2026 · Approx. 9-min read

The day Pakistan came closest to accountability

On a day in April 2020, Pakistan came closer to genuine accountability on the IPP question than at any point in the previous twenty-five years.

A nine-member committee, headed by Muhammad Ali, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan, had spent months investigating the country's power sector. The committee had been commissioned by Prime Minister Imran Khan in early 2019 as part of his anti-corruption agenda. They had access to internal records of NEPRA, the Central Power Purchasing Agency, and the IPPs themselves. They had interviewed officials, examined contracts, calculated payments.

Their report was 278 pages, organised, specific, devastating. It was submitted to the Prime Minister in April 2020. It was, without exaggeration, the most thorough documentation of power sector corruption ever assembled in Pakistan.

Six years later, the report has, to my knowledge, never been officially released. The forensic audit it recommended has never been conducted. The Rs. 1 trillion in identified excess profits has never been pursued for recovery. The named beneficiaries continued in their positions until the PTI government fell in April 2022. Several remain politically active.

This article explains what the report contained, who was named, and the most disturbing part of all, who buried it and why.

What the report found

The report's findings can be summarised in a few sentences. Its full impact requires reading the document itself, which has never been officially released. The broad findings became known through press leaks in mid-2020 and have been corroborated repeatedly since.

Excess profits

IPPs were earning 50 to 70 percent annual profits, against a legal limit of 15 percent set by NEPRA. Some plants had earned dividends totalling 22 times their original equity investment. Some had paid back their entire investment within four years and operated at pure profit for the remaining twenty-five years of their contracts.

The 16 IPPs from the 1994 policy

These plants had collectively invested Rs. 518 billion of equity capital. They had earned profits exceeding Rs. 415 billion. They had paid dividends of over Rs. 310 billion. The math was straightforward. The investment had been multiplied many times over.

2002-policy IPPs

These had received excess payments above what their contracts even legally allowed of approximately Rs. 64.22 billion in just the nine years before 2020. The total excess over the remaining life of the contracts was projected at Rs. 209.46 billion.

Working capital scam

The Central Power Purchasing Agency made monthly payments to IPPs while NEPRA tariff calculations assumed quarterly payments. The two-month gap each quarter was paid by consumers but never actually owed. Estimated cost: billions of rupees per year of unjust profit. I have written about this at The Working Capital Scam.

Capital cost over-statement

Systematic over-invoicing of capital costs across multiple plants. Some 1994-era plants had effective capital costs three to four times higher than comparable plants in Bangladesh and Vietnam. One coal plant's capital cost was overstated by Rs. 30 billion. Through the cost-plus tariff structure, this overstatement translated into permanently inflated tariffs paid by consumers. I have written about this at The Capital Cost Trick.

NEPRA failure

The regulator had systematically failed to verify IPP cost claims, had approved tariff structures that allowed excess returns, and had permitted the very profit extraction it had been created to prevent. I have written about this at NEPRA: The Regulator That Did Not Regulate.

CPEC findings

The report contained specific findings about Chinese CPEC plants, particularly Sahiwal and Port Qasim. Excess capital costs of approximately Rs. 32.46 billion at Sahiwal alone, due to misrepresentation by sponsors regarding interest deduction periods. Combined excess payments to Sahiwal and Port Qasim alone estimated at $2.5 to $2.6 billion over the contract life. These findings would, if pursued, support recovery claims against Chinese state-owned entities.

Conflict of interest

The report named names. Specifically, it identified Razak Dawood, the Prime Minister's commerce adviser, and Nadeem Babar, the Special Assistant on Petroleum, as direct beneficiaries of the IPP payment system. It identified Khusro Bakhtiar's relatives as beneficiaries. It identified the in-laws of Federal Energy Minister Omar Ayub Khan as beneficiaries.

Recommendation

Conduct a forensic audit. Recover approximately Rs. 1 trillion from IPPs that had taken excess payments. Hold the named beneficiaries accountable.

The cabinet meeting

On April 21, 2020, the federal cabinet met to consider the report.

The named beneficiaries, Razak Dawood, Nadeem Babar, Khusro Bakhtiar, and others, were excluded from the meeting on grounds of conflict of interest. This was, in itself, an extraordinary moment. A cabinet meeting from which several senior ministers had been excluded because they were officially identified as conflicted in the matter being discussed.

The remaining cabinet members debated. They reached a decision. The press release issued afterward stated that the cabinet had decided to make the report public.

Senior journalists who covered the meeting reported the decision approvingly. Civil society organisations welcomed it. International observers noted that, for once, Pakistan appeared to be taking serious action against power sector corruption.

The report was scheduled for public release in the following weeks.

The release never happened.

The phone call

In the days that followed the cabinet meeting, according to multiple journalistic accounts, a message was received from a country that, in the careful language of Pakistani diplomacy, was referred to as "a friendly country."

The message conveyed that publication of the report would not be in line with the spirit of bilateral relations. The message was firm. The message was conveyed at the highest level.

Prime Minister Khan was briefed by Asad Umar, a senior cabinet member, and by Omar Ayub Khan, the Federal Energy Minister whose own family members had been named in the report. The two officials reported on the concerns of the friendly country.

The decision to release the report was reversed.

No formal announcement was made. The earlier press release was simply not followed up. Journalists who asked about the release were given evasive answers. The forensic audit was never conducted. The recovery of one trillion rupees was never pursued. The named beneficiaries continued in their positions. The IPPs continued collecting payments.

The report became a kind of ghost. It existed. People knew it existed. Its findings circulated in elite circles. Some leaked sections appeared in newspapers. But it was never officially published. The recommendations were never officially adopted. The accountability process that the cabinet had publicly committed to never materialised.

Imran Khan, the man whose entire political career had been built on attacking power sector corruption, received the report he had personally commissioned, watched his own cabinet vote to publish it, and then quietly buried it under foreign pressure.

Which country

The "friendly country" was never named in any official statement. But the evidence pointing to the answer is overwhelming, and I will lay it out so you can make your own judgement.

The most damaging single category of findings in the report concerned Chinese CPEC plants. Sahiwal and Port Qasim had been identified as having excess capital costs. The $2.5 to $2.6 billion figure was attached to Chinese state-owned enterprises specifically. If the report had been made public and acted upon, the consequences for Chinese companies, and the global reputation of the Belt and Road Initiative, would have been severe.

China had previously expressed concerns to Pakistan about renegotiation of CPEC contracts. Officials had communicated, through diplomatic channels, that any such renegotiation would not be welcome.

When Imran Khan visited Beijing during this period, he was reportedly only able to meet President Xi Jinping on the final day of his four-day visit. An unusual diplomatic signal of displeasure that was widely noted at the time.

No other country had a comparable interest in the suppression of the report. The Western donors had been pushing for power sector reform for years. The Gulf states had no specific stake. The IMF was actively encouraging restructuring. Only one major bilateral partner stood to lose substantially from the report's findings.

I cannot prove definitively that the friendly country was China. I am not in a position to subpoena diplomatic cables. But every piece of available evidence points in one direction. And the pattern of Pakistani government behaviour after the report's suppression, the refusal to seriously raise CPEC IPP renegotiation, the exclusion of CPEC plants from all subsequent reform efforts, the continued payment of capacity charges to Chinese plants even as domestic IPPs were being terminated, confirms that whoever made the phone call had the kind of strategic leverage over Pakistan that only one country in the world possesses.

THE IDENTITY OF THE FRIENDLY COUNTRY

Multiple reporting indicates that the "friendly country" was China. The most damaging findings of the 2020 report concerned Chinese CPEC IPPs. China had previously expressed concerns about renegotiation of CPEC contracts. Subsequent reporting on Imran Khan's diplomatic engagements with China, including a Beijing visit where he was unable to meet President Xi Jinping until the final day, supports this conclusion. This was the most significant external interference in Pakistani power sector decision-making since the 1994 contracts themselves.

The aftermath

In the years since the report was buried, several things have happened.

The named beneficiaries continued in their positions until the PTI government fell in April 2022. None faced legal consequences. Several remain politically active.

The forensic audit was never conducted under the PTI government. The Shehbaz Sharif government that followed has also not conducted it.

The Shehbaz government did, however, conduct partial renegotiations of some 1994-era domestic IPPs in October 2024 and January 2025. Five plants were terminated. Fourteen others had their terms revised. The estimated saving was about Rs. 60 billion per year, meaningful but modest compared to the trillion-rupee scale of the buried report's findings. Notably, all of the renegotiated plants were domestic. None were Chinese.

The full report has, to my knowledge, never been published. Civil society organisations have requested it under right to information laws. Their requests have been rejected or ignored. As of April 2026, the report remains buried.

Imran Khan, the Prime Minister who commissioned the report and then suppressed it, was removed from office in April 2022 and is now in prison on various charges. He has not, in his political comeback narrative, drawn attention to the suppressed report. Doing so would raise uncomfortable questions about why he buried it in the first place.

The Pakistani public, who paid for the system the report exposed and who has now paid an additional six years of capacity charges since the report was suppressed, has not been informed of any of this in clear terms. Until now.

That is one of the reasons I write about this issue. The 2020 inquiry was the closest Pakistan came to accountability. Its suppression is the closest documented example of how the Pakistani electricity system actually defends itself from reform.

What you should take away

Three things to remember about the 2020 Inquiry Report.

The findings are real and documented. Even without official publication, the broad findings were leaked and have been corroborated by multiple subsequent investigations and reports including the IEEFA work of 2024-2025.

Pakistani institutions came close. The cabinet voted to publish. The committee did its work. The recommendations were specific and actionable. The system did not lack the technical capacity for accountability. It lacked the political will to override foreign pressure.

The reform agenda is documented. The way out, in detail, is in the 2020 report. Forensic audits. Recovery of excess profits. Renegotiation of CPEC IPP terms. Reform of NEPRA. Holding named beneficiaries accountable. None of this requires new analysis. All of it requires political will to act on existing analysis.

The report's continued suppression is, in some ways, the deepest scandal of the entire IPP story. It is also the easiest to fix. A future Prime Minister with political mandate could publish it on day one of taking office. The publication itself would be the beginning of accountability.

Until then, the report exists, the findings are known to those who looked, and the IPPs continue collecting their payments. Every month. Every year.

Now you know what was in it. Pass it on.

Thank you for reading.

, Asad Baig, Lahore, April 2026

Frequently asked questions

What was the 2020 Power Sector Inquiry Report? A 278-page report submitted in April 2020 by a nine-member committee headed by Muhammad Ali, former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan. It documented systematic excess profits by IPPs (50-70% annual returns against a 15% legal limit), inflated capital costs, the working capital scam, and named specific government officials as direct beneficiaries.

Who buried the 2020 Power Sector Inquiry Report? The federal cabinet under Prime Minister Imran Khan voted on April 21, 2020 to make the report public. The decision was reversed within days following pressure from a "friendly country" never officially named. Multiple reporting and the pattern of subsequent Pakistani government behaviour, particularly the exclusion of CPEC plants from all reform efforts, points overwhelmingly to China as the source of that pressure.

Who is Muhammad Ali, the head of the inquiry? Muhammad Ali is the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP). He led the nine-member committee commissioned by Imran Khan in early 2019 to investigate the country's power sector. The committee submitted its report in April 2020.

Who was named in the 2020 inquiry as conflict-of-interest beneficiaries? Razak Dawood (Prime Minister's commerce adviser), Nadeem Babar (Special Assistant on Petroleum), Khusro Bakhtiar (relatives), Federal Energy Minister Omar Ayub Khan (in-laws). All named beneficiaries continued in their positions until the PTI government fell in April 2022. None faced legal consequences.

Has the 2020 report been published? No. As of April 2026, the full report has, to public knowledge, never been officially released. Civil society organisations have requested it under right to information laws. Their requests have been rejected or ignored. Some leaked sections circulated in mid-2020 and form the basis of subsequent journalism.

What were the report's main recommendations? Conduct a forensic audit of all 1994 and 2002 policy IPPs. Recover approximately Rs. 1 trillion in excess profits. Hold the named beneficiaries accountable. Reform NEPRA's tariff approval methodology. None of these recommendations have been implemented.

Sources and notes

Power Sector Inquiry Report 2020, Government of Pakistan, headed by Muhammad Ali, former SECP Chairman (ARY News mirror)
Express Tribune, Irregularities caused over Rs4 trillion loss (April 2020)
Pakistan Today, Power scam report to be made public, cabinet decides (21 April 2020)
The News, IPPs strongly criticise head of govt's committee (April 2020)
The Diplomat, China in Pakistan's Power Sector: The Hidden Costs (January 2025)
IEEFA Reports on Pakistan Power Sector by Haneea Isaad (2024-2025)
Multiple OCCRP and Dawn investigative pieces on Sharif family acquittal and related matters

The 2020 Inquiry Report That Was Buried: What It Said and Who Stopped It

The 2020 Inquiry Report That Was Buried: What It Said and Who Stopped It

The most thorough documentation of Pakistani IPP corruption ever assembled, suppressed within weeks of completion. What was inside, who was named, and the phone call that buried it.

The day Pakistan came closest to accountability