Skip to main content

Karachi package after monitoring financial policy: minister

KARACHI: Federal Minister for Maritime Affairs Syed Ali Zaidi on Saturday said that funds from the Karachi package of Rs162 billion recently announced by Prime Minister Imran Khan would only be released after adopting a financial discipline and monitoring policy.

Speaking as chief guest at a seminar ‘Bio-Economy-Future of Pakistan’ organised by the FPCCI, he said the federal government would not like to see these funds sink without achieving results.

The minister said he had been fighting for Karachi and had also put up many suggestions before the cabinet and even approached Prime Minister Imran Khan personally.

The system, he said, was so corrupt that when he took the initiative of cleaning six major nullahs of the city it came to his knowledge that most of ‘kachra kundis’ were sold and it was a big business.

But the most startling disclosure made by the minister was related to the cost of removing garbage from city areas to earth-filled site.

Mr Zaidi said the contract of cleaning major city nullahs was awarded to FWO (Frontier Works Organisation) and as per their calculation per tonne cost came to around $6.5 only.

Similarly, the minister said that Bahria Town which assisted him in garbage removing drive from nullahs got per tonne cost at around $6.5 per ton.

However, according to the minister, if garbage is first removed to garbage transit stations for drying purpose and then to earth-filled site the cost goes to $10 per tonne. But, he added, the Sindh government’s cost for removing garbage stood as high as $28 per tonne.

The minister said out of two weighing machines at the earth-filled site only one was working and each truck on an average carried a load of 35-40 tonnes of garbage. He further said that one truck at the earth-filled site was recorded for four trips and this is how funds are being leaked and looted.

Published in Dawn, September 29th, 2019



from The Dawn News - Home https://ift.tt/2obr59a
via IFTTT

Comments

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 ...

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 ...

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...