Privatisation Commission clarifies

ISLAMABAD: The Privatisation Commission is actively engaged in providing information about the progress of the privatisation program to all of its stakeholders with the aim to ensure transparency and promote a factual knowledge about the transaction process.
It is therefore important to clarify an article titled ‘Borrowing Deep’ published in ‘Money Matters’ in The News on 16 November, 2015.
In this article, the writer refers to an alleged statement of Secretary Privatisation Commission, in which he was quoted that the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) expressed annoyance with the government extending bailout packages and expenditure based financial support to those public sector entities, which are under the active privatisation plan.
He is also quoted for conveying IMF’s dissatisfaction with regard to the delay in the privatisation process.
The Privatisation Commission would like to strongly emphasise that such statements have never been made by the secretary, as he neither attended the IMF review meeting recently held in Dubai nor is privy to any such statement by the IMF.
Rather, the writer extracted the statement from an incorrect news-item published on 6 November, 2015 in a newspaper, about the meeting of Pakistan Steel Mills’ (PSM) board of directors.
Following the publication of the incorrect news items, the management of PSM immediately responded by issuing a news clarification the following day, rebutting the alleged statement. Since PSM has already clarified the factually incorrect statement of the Secretary Privatisation Commission, it is extremely disappointing to see wrongly attributed statements used as reference without being carefully verified by the author.