ISLAMABAD: Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari on Thursday said that his party would never permit the privatisation of Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) and would resist any move towards that end at every platform.
“Strong evidence has come to surface during the past five years that faulty policies were deliberately adopted to make PIA and the Pakistan Steel Mills (PSM) incur losses running in hundreds of billions of rupees,” the PPP chief told a delegation of PIA employees belonging to the Peoples Unity which called on him at the Zardari House in Islamabad.
The criminal neglect in running these state-run entities shows that it was by design so that they incur huge liabilities and thereby a false justification could be created for their sale at throwaway prices, he said. Recounting these faulty policies, he said that the PIA had no business plan and floated a thoughtless ‘Premier Service’ which incurred a loss of nearly Rs 3 billion in a few months before the service was discontinued due to severe public criticism.
Bilawal said that highly expensive lease agreements, open skies policy without consideration of national interest and discontinuation of some profitable international routes led the PIA down a steep slope. Tens of landing rights in different parts of the country were given to just one foreign airline in one day and without reciprocity while drastically reducing PIA’s market share, he said.
Spokesperson Farhatulllah Babar said in a statement that the PPP chairman also asked the Peoples Unity employees to prepare a comprehensive report on how the national airline was deliberately mismanaged to pave way for its sale to some private party at throwaway prices.
He said that the mala fide intent of the government was apparent from the fact that the recommendations of the Senate special committee on PIA for overhaul of the board of directors were never implemented even though under the rules of the business their implementation had become mandatory.
Bilawal said that unannounced yet systematic transfer of lucrative PIA services to a private airline at a time when the chief executive of the country himself was owner of an airline raised serious questions vis-à-vis conflict of interest.
Bilawal said that the PSM reached the brink of precipice after being denied gas supply since 2015 and that too at a time when its production was at 65 per cent. The timing and manner of privatisation is also intriguing as the matter is not being discussed in the parliament, he said, adding that general elections are around the corner and there is no time left for undertaking a transparent privatisation process.
Published in Daily Times, March 2nd 2018.
