LAHORE: For the first time in Punjab, it has been decided to get pre-credit approval of projects to facilitate loans from banks to investors in the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) sector.
In this regard, the Punjab Board of Investment and Trade (PBIT) has decided to engage commercial banks, including the Bank of Punjab. Sources said the PBIT economic team would design projects and market them to overseas Pakistanis after getting loan approval from banks.
Sources said the pre-credit approval of projects would have the advantage that when an investor would approach a bank to seek a loan for the project, the bank would have all the data and feasibility of the project in advance and the borrowing would become easy. According to sources, banks sometimes refuse to give loans to projects, which proves to be a big obstacle in investment.
The PBIT would now market the same projects for investors for which loan approval from banks had already been taken. For projects in the SMEs sector, loan approvals of $1m to $5m and then up to $10 million will be taken in advance from banks.
In this regard, the new chairman of the Punjab Board of Investment and Trade, Muntaha Ashraf, told this reporter that the SMEs would play an important role in restoring the country’s economy. She said that the country’s economic indicators were getting stronger, “and we can take full advantage of it by supporting the small and medium business sector and put the country’s economy on the path to improvement”. She confirmed that the PBIT economic team would take pre-credit approval from banks for the projects. Up to 75pc of the work for investors would now be done by her institution, which would prove to be a milestone in the government’s policy of ease of doing business.
The PBIT chairman said that for the first time, for the convenience of those who want to invest in Punjab, a data bank of projects created by PBIT for various sectors, would be created, in which more than 250 projects would be ready with the approval of loans from banks, so that investors could save their time by getting project details in just one click.
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