Daily Times

The Islamabad Chamber of Commerce & Industry (ICCI) has called upon the government to cut all customs and regulatory duties on the primary raw material of steel industry, like meltable steel scrap, in the budget to counter the increase in cost caused by currency devaluation, interest rate hike, raise in power tariff and new taxation measures.

In a statement issued on Thursday, ICCI Acting President Rafat Farid said the government had abolished the special procedures of sales tax for steel industry in the Federal Budget 2019-20, however, he stressed that the government should come up with some policy interventions for reducing the cost of doing business for this important industry so that it could play more effective role in the economic development and exports of the country. He said that if duties on meltable scrap were not removed, capacity utilisations of steel industry would decrease, leading to drastic fall in government revenue.

He said the government should provide a level playing field for various sectors of the steel industry, including steel melting, re-rolling, ship breaking and other downstream sectors. He said there were various tax anomalies due to which substitute products have different tariff structures that created distortions in the market.

The ICCI acting president said that re-rollable scrap was a substitute product for ship plate and steel billet manufactured by the ship breaking and steel melting industries. However, there were different import duties on re-rollable scrap and steel billets, while sales tax levied on steel melting sector was higher than that levied on the ship breaking sector, he said.