Rabbani terms IMF ‘new East India Company’

ISLAMABAD: Former chairman of the Senate Mian Raza Rabbani Sunday said that a current employee of the IMF being appointed as the SBP governor was deplorable. “This amounts to colonisation of Pakistan by the international financial imperialists,” he said in a statement.

“The IMF is the new East India Company, they have their men in place as the adviser on finance and governor State Bank, in previous arrangements the takeover was not so complete. But then no Pakistani government claimed that there may be an offshore discovery of oil and gas. The looters have come before hand,” he maintained.

The SBP governor, he pointed out, being an employee of the IMF, which was giving a bailout package to Pakistan, was a conflict of interest and it was obvious that his loyalties would not be with Pakistan.

“It is a matter of shame that the provincial finance ministers were made to appear before a middle ranking officer of the IMF and make promises of good behaviour,” he contended. Rabbani regretted that Pakistan’s financial sovereignty and national security had been compromised by a ‘sell out to the IMF’.

Meanwhile, the PML-N leader Marriyum Aurangzeb said Pakistan’s sovereignty has been compromised and this time the East India Company did not even need to fight because the incompetent prime minister dished it out to IMF on a platter.

In a statement, she said that instead of negotiating a favourable and sustainable economic plan, the prime minister knew nothing better than to pass the entire country’s fiscal and monetary control to the IMF representative by appointing their employees as head of Pakistan’s state bank, and minister finance, she said.

“The insecure and complexed prime minister fired his best bet at negotiating a near favourable package and handed over the lock and key of the country’s treasury to the IMF,” she opined. Marriyum said that it is no secret that Dr Reza Baqir excels in the art of keeping countries buried under debt to pile up insane levels of interests for his original employee, the IMF.

“The PTI liar in chief, who used to rant about how invincible and competent his team is and it would fix the country’s economy in the blink of an eye, has embarrassed the nation by not just bowing down to the IMF, but kneeling to every single one of their orders no matter how unreasonable,” she said, adding that Imran Khan doesn’t need to go to IMF anymore because he has formally made the country’s top financial institution their office.

The former information minister said it is all making sense as why Nawaz Sharif is being pushed out of the way by hook or by crook. “It is because he would have stood against such a shameful surrender of an entire country to a third party financial institution,” she stressed.

She said the PML-N leader Nawaz Sharif gave Pakistan the honourable multi-billion dollar gift of CPEC while the Imran Khan has yielded the country to its last penny to IMF. Marriyum said that every single day of this PTI government is another Armageddon on the people of Pakistan. She said the country had not seen a day without a new disaster ever since Imran Khan and his regime have taken control. She revealed that the Rs9 patrol bomb on the already crushed people before Ramazan had been bombarded on the behest of the IMF.