Zardari, Bilawal oppose privatisation of PIA, PSM

ISLAMABAD: Chairman Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Bilawal Bhutto Zardari has 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 by tooth and nail from his party both inside and outside the Parliament.

While presiding over a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Privatisation (CCoP), Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi approved privatisation plan for both PIA and Pakistan Steel Mills, which have been deliberately devastated, financially and administratively, during last four and half years misrule of PML-N.

The PPP chairman said that common man, as well as experts, have been taken aback by the decision of a man who himself was chairman of PIA before he launched his own profit-making private airline, whose profit shoot up rapidly. Likewise, Nawaz Sharif whose family leads the cartel of private steel industry in the country dragged the largest state industrial unit Pakistan Steel Mills to a point of operational death. “Both Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and disqualified prime minister Nawaz Sharif are conspiring to sell PIA and Pakistan Steel Mills most probably to their hidden partners,” adding that they are selling national assets with one hand and purchasing by other.

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

In the meanwhile, former president Asif Ali Zardari has warned the government against the privatisation of the PIA, saying that the mysteriously hurried move on the eve of general elections was motivated not by turning around the national carrier but by making quick buck at 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; it will not be”, the former president said in a statement on Saturday.

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

Spokesperson Senator Farhatullah Babar said that the former president also directed members of Parliament belonging to the PPP to raise the issue in both the National Assembly and the Senate and expose the malafide intent behind it. The former president said that the loss making ventures recently undertaken by PIA raised doubts whether these were deliberately designed to increase its liabilities and thereby create justification for its hurried privatisation.

Zardari said that during the PPP government international oil prices stood at nearly 150 dollars a barrel which reduced to less than 50 dollars in 2015. Like other airlines this steep fall in international oil prices should have enabled PIA to reduce its losses but instead the losses increased, he said.

Bilawal Bhutto Zardari also directed the parliamentary party to raise voice against the fraudulent privatisation of PIA and Pakistan Steel Mills in the Parliament as well as on all other available forums.