KARACHI, Jan 27: The Export Promotion Bureau (EPB) has constituted three different committees to evolve a collective strategy to counter the claims of the representative body of European textile industry, Eurocoton, that bedlinen dumping is causing material injury.

The three committees have been given different tasks such as co-coordination, legal issues and control of financial matters required to defend the anti-dumping case by hiring a lawyer.

There are around 211 exporters of bedlinen to the EU states and each exporter has been asked to contribute 1.5 euro per ton of the quota towards expenditure cost needed for defending the case.

However, sources close to the EPB has told Dawn that many disputes have risen among bedlinen exporters over the composition of samples as a result several names have to be withdrawn from the list finalized earlier.

It is also learnt on authority that several exporters have directly approached the European Union Commission suggesting to include their name in the list of sample investigation exporters or companies.

The Ministry of Commerce (MoC) is in touch with all the stakeholders by involving the EPB, Economic Minister in Brussels, and is doing its utmost to create awareness amongst all the stakeholders about the consequences and implications of the investigations.

The individual exporters of bedlinen have been advised to keep their management accounting books in perfect conditions particularly all those exporters whose prices were within Minimum Export Price (MEP) so that they could be included in the samples to offset the low price sampled exporters.

Ever since the Eurocoton had lodged a complaint with the Commission the Ministry of Commerce through EPB has been holding regular parleys and meeting with all the stakeholders of bedlinen. the objectives of these meetings were to achieve a better understanding of implications and consequences of anti-dumping duty. Secondly, to evolve a collective strategy to rebut the claims of Eurocoton through pro- active role of government, respective associations and other stakeholders.

As a result of these meetings an eleven-member committee of the stakeholders headed by the chairman Quota Supervisory Council (QSC) Abdul Aziz Memon had been constituted to act as a co-coordinator for all the stakeholders.

Similarly, a four-member legal committee had been constituted to handle all legal issues to defend the case. It was also decided that all the exporters of bedlinen should give their consent for sampling.

In this connection the EPB also directly contacted individual exporters advising them to come forward and give their consent. In order to facilitate exporters the ministry of commerce had been in constant touch with National Tariff Commission to assist exporters in filling and completing the questionnaire being sent to various exporters directly by European Commission.

According to latest position 174, out of approximately 211 exporters of bedlinen from all over the country have sent their consent to EC.

After constituting five member money management committee the mode and schedule of payment to the lawyer was also finalized. Various legal aspects, financial implications and role of MoC, EPB, QSC and Economic Minister (Trade), Brussels as well as of all the stakeholders had been finalized.

Despite all these efforts many bedlinen exporters are not satisfied with the arrangement made by the MoC and EPB for defending the anti-dumping case and complain that even some exporters have not cooperated and this may result in losing the case at this critical juncture when only two years are left for removal of quotas by the end of 2004.