Daily Times

Supreme Court lawyer and an expert on corporate and aviation Hafiz Ahsaan Ahmad Khokhar while commenting the present restructuring Plan said that PIA and describing the history was founded on October 23rd, 1946 as Orient Airways, and finally Orient Airways was nationalized and merged with other airlines by the Government of Pakistan to form ‘Pakistan International Airlines.

He said that the 1970s and 1980s era was a glorious period for PIA when it provided its technical and administrative services to many countries and obtained five new Boeing 737-300s in PIA’s fleet in 1985 making it the first Asian airline with such a diverse aircraft that despite having a good long history of PIA and the strength of passengers they have to every corner of the world, the continuous mismanagement and mal-governance have taken PIA to a cumulative loss of 635 billion as reported by the end of September 2023 that resultantly the PIA cannot pay the due taxes to FBR and the aviation and navigation charges as well to different countries, and have lost many important international routes and passengers.

According to Hafiz Ahsaan Ahmad Khokhar, there are numerous factors that contributed to the airline reaching this point, including weak governance, poor performance, overstaffing, a lack of modernization in its operations, and corruption. The government provided it with piecemeal support to cover the billions in daily expenses without requiring the management to perform better or providing funds for newer aircraft.

He added that over the past several years, every government that took office had expressed a desire for rehabilitation and restructuring, but that nothing had ever materialized as a result of lack of political will and implementation, with the people of Pakistan ultimately bearing the cost of this failure. In addition, he claims that despite numerous pledges by PIA management over the years to turn around the company’s finances, they have always fallen short.

According to Hafiz Ahsaan Ahmad Khokhar, a restructuring plan has been revealed and approved by the PIA Board. The plan primarily divides the PIA into two areas: a good PIA that has reportedly the fewest liabilities such as aircraft, profitable assets, and essential departments and a bad PIA that has the large liabilities such as Loans, non-core departments, and “unnecessary” employees in line with Air India, which in his opinion has a quiet distinct history and facts. However, the Federal government would, however, have final say. He claimed that if there was legal room for its execution and clarity was lacking in the current reorganization plan, there would be several legal issues.

There is no disputing the urgent need for restructuring for PIA to save the taxpayers a significant amount of money, according to Khokhar, so the current effort should not be merely lip service or remain on paper but rather be a permanent restructuring plan with the backing of law for PIA that should provide the way forward with government resolve by appointing technical minimum staff on merit and making funding for the restructuring available and separate clearly the non-core business includes Airport Ground Handling, Airport Hotel, Catering Business, Engineering Services from the airline core business such as aircraft ownership, flight operations (Cockpit/Cabin Crew management), PIA Training Centre, Flight Simulator, Pax/Cargo Sales/Marketing and Only Small Supporting Admin/Finance.