November 9, 2001	Friday	Shaba’an 22, 1422

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SWABI, Nov 8: Some units in Gadoon Amazai Industrial Estate have started closing down, with their sponsors blaming their action on the unabated US-led air raids on Afghanistan.

The workers, however, contend that the entrepreneurs had been looking for an excuse to expel them without giving them any benefit and the Afghanistan’s situation has come in as a handy pretext for doing so.

The industrialists claimed on Thursday that the war had created hurdles in the way to bring raw material from foreign countries to Karachi Port and then onto Gadoon estate, forcing them to lay off some workers.

They said in the prevailing situation the lay-off had become inevitable as retaining all the workers would have put added strain on their finances.

The most daunting problem they were left to cope was how to run units round-the-clock when there was not enough raw material to keep the factories humming, they said.

Of the 450 units in the estate, about 410 had already been closed down, they admitted. Most of the empty buildings were either destroyed or nearing collapse.

Ten units had continued production at intervals and only 30 units managed to churn out their products round-the-clock.

Requesting anonymity, an industrialist said: “Broadly speaking, a number of entrepreneurs had succeeded to dodge the law enforcing agencies and shifted their machineries to some other attractive industrial zones soon after the withdrawal of GAIE’s 100 per cent tax holiday given by the first Nawaz Sharif government in May 1990.

Later, the industrialists used different tactics to shift their machineries despite a government ban. The continued dominance of Gadoon estate by Karachi- and Lahore-based industrialists created this situation, he said.

It was confirmed that a ghee unit had also closed down and fired some 60 workers, while closure of two more units was also on the cards.

An official of the ghee unit said that import of ghee-making material from the Central Asian Republics had stopped as a result of the US attack on Afghanistan. In such a situation, the unit could not run its operations.

The laid-off workers would be reinstated once the imports resumed and the factory reopened, he said.

The workers, however, alleged that the industry had already managed to sell 1,500 ton palm oil in Karachi and 3,000 ton more imports from Malaysia was expected. A plastic factory of the same owner had also been closed, they said.