Middle East facing sectarian war: Sethi

Says tax amnesty scheme is an attempt to expand tax net, not whiten black money

LAHORE: Najam Sethi on Monday said the Pathankot airbase attack was not similar to the Mumbai attacks, but a bit larger in scale than the Gurdaspur terror strike.

New Delhi, he said, wanted to continue Pak-India talks, adding that the Modi government would ascertain whether the attack was carried out by jihadists or it had been orchestrated by the establishment.

In Geo News programme ‘Aapas ki Baat’, Sethi said the Indian prime minister reacted cautiously after the attack and the foreign secretary-level talks would certainly be held sooner of later. If India reached to the result that the Pakistani establishment had a role in the attack then there would be no dialogue, he added.

Sethi said the Indian media was trying to give an expression that Gen Raheel Sharif was unhappy over the meeting between the prime ministers of Pakistan and India, and that it was possible he might have given the go-ahead to attack. To prove its point, the Indian media was arguing that there had been no meeting between Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and the army chief after the Lahore visit of Modi, he added.

Sethi said both PPP and PTI would oppose the tax amnesty scheme which was actually not meant to whiten black money. The amnesty scheme was actually an attempt to expand tax net and would only apply to traders, he added.

Explaining his point, Sethi said there was an obvious difference between the latest scheme and the similar previous initiatives in which there had been no limit to whiten the black money. In the scheme introduced by the Nawaz government, a trader could show his turnover paying a fixed percentage amount as tax, followed by 25 per cent increase in tax in each of the next two years; however, he would automatically be included in income tax net in the fourth year, he added.

Sethi said the country could not progress, if people didn’t pay taxes. The government could provide services to the people only if it was able to collect money through taxation; otherwise, the government would be forced to borrow from IMF, he added.

Sethi said Saudi Arabia-Iran relations started worsening after the Iranian revolution and the two countries were currently leading separate blocs, adding that Middle East was experiencing a sectarian war.