Oil tanker owners’ body threatens countrywide strike

ISLAMABAD: The All Pakistan Oil Tanker Owners Association (APOTOA) has demanded of the government to resolve their issues in 10 days; otherwise, they would observe a countrywide strike in protest of the Senate Standing Committee on Petroleum’s recent order to PSO for implementing Ogra’s standards regulations on tankers on Oct 9, 2018, despite the cut-off date was September 2019 to upgrade their oil tankers. “If our issues were not settled in 10 days, then as a protest, our tankers would stop supplying oil in entire Pakistan from all oil marketing companies (OMCs). And this ‘government of change’ and its ministers would be responsible for it,” APOTA Chairman Mir Muhammad Yousaf Shahwani said this in a press conference here on Friday.

Yousaf Shahwani said that on the directives of the Senate Committee, Pakistan State Oil (PSO) on October 9, 2018, issued a circular No 183, under which this state-owned MC has stopped calibrating our oil tankers and has asked us to calibrate it from a third party.

It is pertinent to mention here that the Senate committee had on Sept 13 directed the PSO to “strictly follow the Queue system except in the case of lorries which are in dilapidated condition and that there should not be 2nd queue. The committee also asked to ban all the lorries which are in dilapidated condition by giving comprehensive reasons for this in writing.” Normally, OMCs calibrate tankers for a year. But, despite the PSO’s already calibrated tankers, which still has time to complete a year time, have been stopped from supplying the oil.