Skip to main content

PM urged to directly release funds to Karachi, Hyderabad LGs

KARACHI: A delegation of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P) called on Prime Minister Imran Khan on Friday and demanded that Islamabad provide funds directly to the local governments of Karachi and Hyderabad so that they could carry out emergency basic infrastructure works in the two urban centres of Sindh.

A brief statement issued by the PM Office on Friday said the meeting was held in Islamabad at the prime minister’s chamber in the Parliament House.

The MQM-P side was led by its convener and federal minister Dr Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui while the prime minister was assisted by Defence Minister Pervez Khattak and the PM’s special assistants Naeemul Haq and Nadeem Afzal Chann.

MQM-P spokesman Aminul Haq, an MNA who also attended Friday’s meeting, told Dawn that PM’s point man Jahangir Khan Tareen — who had played a pivotal role in forging a coalition with the MQM-P — was also present in the meeting.

While the official statement said nothing about the matters discussed in the meeting, Mr Haq said the prime minister assured the MQM-P of his full cooperation in directly releasing special funds to the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC) and the Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (HMC) — both controlled by the mayors of the MQM-P.

MQM-P delegation also discusses with Imran issues of university, missing persons

“We demanded the prime minister release [development] funds directly to the KMC and HMC,” he said, adding the MQM-P had already sought Rs25bn for Karachi and Rs5bn for Hyderabad for improving the ruined civic infrastructure in the two cities.

He said the MQM-P delegation urged the prime minister to release the first instalment of funds for Karachi and Hyderabad at the earliest.

However, Mr Haq evaded a question as to how the federal government would bypass the Pakistan Peoples Party-led Sindh government to release funds to the Karachi and Hyderabad local governments directly.

He said the MQM-P also demanded early completion of the K-IV water supply project. He said the prime minister assured them that the federal government would soon release its share in the funding for the project and ensure its timely completion.

Mr Haq said the prime minister was also requested to direct the authorities concerned to make Hyderabad University functional as soon as possible.

When asked whether the MQM-P, which got two federal ministries, had raised the issue of a third ministry, he said: “This issue did not come under discussion.”

Mr Haq said the MQM-P representatives also raised the issue of missing workers of their party and urged the prime minister to play his role, as promised earlier, in tracing their whereabouts and releasing them.

He said the prime minister agreed in principle that all missing persons needed to be recovered as soon as possible.

He said the defence minister would coordinate with theMQM-P in sorting out a mechanism to trace and recover the missing persons.

Besides Dr Siddiqui and Mr Haq, MNAs Iqbal Muhammad Ali Khan, Usama Qadri, Kishwar Zehra and Sabir Hussain Qaimkhani attended the meeting.

Meanwhile, the prime minister also met MNAs Mohammad Afzal Khan Dhandla, Asim Nazir, Malik Karamat Ali Khokhar and Tahir Iqbal separately in his chamber at the Parliament House on Friday.

Special Assistant to the Prime Minister Naeemul Haq was present in the meetings.

Published in Dawn, June 29th, 2019



from The Dawn News - Home https://ift.tt/2IXDh5C
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Trump says he urged team to ‘slow’ COVID-19 testing

US President Donald Trump said Saturday he was encouraging health officials in his administration to slow down coronavirus testing, arguing that increased tests lead to more cases being discovered. The president has claimed falsely on several occasions that surges of COVID-19 in several states can be explained by greater numbers of diagnostic tests. At his first rally since the outbreak forced nationwide shutdowns in March, Trump told the crowd in Tulsa, Oklahoma that testing was a “double-edged sword.” The United States — which has more deaths and cases than any other country — has carried out more than 25 million coronavirus tests, placing it outside the top 20 countries in the world, per capita. “Here is the bad part: When you do testing to that extent, you are going to find more people, you will find more cases,” Trump argued. “So I said to my people ‘slow the testing down.’ They test and they test.” It was not clear from Trump’s tone if he was playing to the crowd, who ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sir Anwer Pervez, richest Pakistani British businessman, loses £432m in pandemic

Sir Anwar Pervez OBE, the founder and chairman of Bestway Cash & Carry has lost £432 million during the coronavirus pandemic to bring him down to No 50 on the richest British people list. The list has 1,000 people and is published by the Sunday Times newspaper . Pervez was at No 42 previously.  The 2020 list of the UK’s richest shows its first fall in wealth in a decade as Britain’s wealthiest people lost tens of billions of pounds in the coronavirus pandemic, the Sunday Times reported in its Rich List 2020. The newspaper, which has produced the respected annual ranking of the country’s 1,000 wealthiest people since 1989, found the past two months had resulted in the super-rich losing £54 billion ($65 billion). More than half of the billionaires in Britain had seen drops in their worth by as much as £6b, a decrease in their collective wealth unprecedented since 2009 and the financial crisis. The Hinduja brothers, who topped last year’s list with a £22b fortune, saw among ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Despite reservations about jury, Pakistan to implement FATF reforms: envoy

WASHINGTON: Despite its reservations about the fairness of the jury which is to determine Pakistan’s performance against terror financing, the government is committed to implementing its action plan for dealing with this issue, says Islamabad’s Washington envoy Asad Majeed Khan. In a conversation with a prominent US scholar George Perkovich, recorded at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington on Monday afternoon, Ambassador Khan said the actions that Pakistan had taken so far to eliminate terror financing were “reflective of the political will”. “We feel that we have done a lot. We are also clear and determined to do more,” said the envoy while responding to a question about a meeting of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) held in Orlando last week, which asked Pakistan to implement its own action plan for eliminating terror financing by October. Failing to do so could put Pakistan on a blacklist of violators and bring strict economic sanctions too. “But we w...
Post a Comment
Read more