Skip to main content

No pay raise for Imran, says PM office

KARACHI: Terming re­por­ts on increase in the prime minister’s salary ‘baseless’ and ‘unfortunate’, the PM office spokesperson has clarified that there will be no increase in the premier’s official pay.

The clarification was issued on Thursday in response to media reports alleging that the prime minister’s gross salary was being increased to Rs800,000.

“At a time when the prime minister was carrying out a campaign to slash the government’s expenditures which he initiated from his own, the propagation of such a baseless and concocted news report was unfortunate,” the spokesperson remarked, according to a press release.

It said the prime minister at a recent meeting of the federal cabinet, while amending the rules for perks and privileges of the president and prime minister, allowed both of them to declare only one residence as their camp offices.

The prime minister had also directed the cabinet to define a limit of the expenditures permissible at the camp offices, contrary to the previous practices.

The spokesperson quoted the prime minister as saying that expenditures incurred on the head of the government were borne out of the people’s hard-earned money, so it was a must to keep it at the minimum level.

Earlier, during a cabinet meeting on Thursday, Minis­ter for Communica­tions and Postal Services Murad Saeed said Prime Minister Imran Khan was living at his private residence at Banigala despite being the premier and even spent money from his own pocket for the construction of the road leading to his home.

‘Salary not enough to cover expenses’

Prime Minister Khan recently disclosed that he could not cover his household expenses from his official salary.

“We have reduced the expenses of Prime Minister House by 40 per cent. I live in my own home, pay my own expenses. My [official] salary is not enough to cover the expenses of my own household,” he said during his a recent interaction with the business community.

The premier also said that his expenses on foreign trips were 10 times less than those spent by leaders before him.

Describing his participation in the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting as the “cheapest” official visit, PM Khan had said that his trip was sponsored by his friends and well-known businessmen Ikram Sehgal and Imran Chaudhry.

This is not the first time the prime minister’s salary has come under public discussion. Last year, it was reported that the prime minister earned less than federal and provincial ministers.

According to The News, as per his February 2019 salary slip, the prime minister is entitled to a gross salary of Rs201,574 which is reduced to 196,979 after tax and other deductions.

Published in Dawn, January 31st, 2020



from The Dawn News - Home https://ift.tt/2RHetTB
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