PESHAWAR: Leader of the Businessmen Forum and former Senator Ilyas Ahmad Bilour has expressed concern over the appointment of Reza Baqir, dual nationality holder and an official of International Monetary Fund (IMF), as governor of the State Bank of Pakistan, which he said has apparently indicated intention of the incumbent government to make country slave of the IMF.
In a statement here on Tuesday, the country senior parliamentarian and one of the leading businessmen of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Ilyas Bilour said former president Gen (r) Pervez Musharraf had imported Shaukat Aziz from the United States when he came into power, who was first appointed as finance minister and later the prime minister.
He said that Prime Minister Imran Khan is toeing the line of former president Pervez Musharraf by appointing an IMF employee to important positions in the country, which was not in the interest of Pakistan and its people.
Ilyas Bilour maintained that the appointment of IMF employee as the SBP governor was reflected the government act of handing over Pakistan completely to the IMF.
He said the employees of IMF would now sit on both sides of the table to make the Pakistan slave, while they would also decide the destiny of the nation.
Dr Baqir, an Aitchison alumnus, earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in Economics and has been working with the IMF for the last 16 years.
He has been the chief of the IMF’s Debt Policy Division and worked on IMF policies on external debt sustainability and restructuring of member countries. He has helped design debt and fiscal policies for crisis-hit countries like Greece and Ukraine, among others.
Before the IMF, Dr Baqir worked at the World Bank, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Union Bank of Switzerland.
Dr Baqir is the second IMF staffer to head the central bank. Before him, Dr Mohammad Yaqub was also brought in from the IMF to head the State Bank from 1993 to 1999.
Bilour claimed that the government was taking dictation from the IMF. It devaluated Pakistan currency, pushing up the prices of essential food commodities that make country confronted financial crunch.
He appealed to the Chief Justice of Pakistan Justice Asif Saeed Khosa to take ‘suo moto notice’ of the appointment of dual nationality holder and IMF employee as the SBP governor.
