Daily Times

KARACHI: The Pakistan People’s Party on Saturday warned Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi to shelve attempts to privatise Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) and Pakistan Steel Mills (PSM) or get ready to face stiff resistance both inside and outside the parliament.

While presiding over a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Privatisation (CCoP) a couple of days back, Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi had approved restructuring plan for both PIA and the PSM.

PPP Chairman Bilawal Bhutto said that the common man as well as experts have been taken aback by the decision of a person who himself had been chairman of the PIA before he launched his own profit-making private airline. Likewise, he said, Nawaz Sharif whose family leads the cartel of private steel industry in the country dragged the largest state industrial unit to a point of operational death. “Both Abbasi and Nawaz are conspiring to sell PIA and PSM most probably to their hidden partners,” Bilawal said, adding that they are selling national assets with one hand and purchasing by other.

The PPP chairman warned the PML-N government to stop ‘personalisation’ in the name of privatisation and called upon the masses, especially the trade unions, to join his struggle against the economic terrorism being imposed on the people of Pakistan.

Former president and PPP Co-Chairman Aasif Ali Zardari also warned the government against the privatisation of the PIA, saying that the mysteriously hurried move a few months prior to the general elections was motivated not by turning around the national carrier but by making quick buck at the public expense. “Hurried and thoughtless privatisation of the PIA without recourse to parliament at this time is a crime against the people that must not be allowed,” the former president said in a statement.

Zardari also warned the potential buyers to desist from purchasing the national airline in their own interest, adding that they might have to face consequences of being part of a commercial undertaking based on criminal motives.

Published in Daily Times, February 18^th 2018.