KARACHI, April 20: The Sindh High Court has decried “the practice of government departments to issue notifications without any consideration whatsoever not only to their implications but also to their very contents.”

The observation was made by a division bench while allowing a number of petitions challenging the levy of vend fee and permit fee on methanol by the Sindh government. The petitions were moved by manufacturers of formaldehyde and formaldehyde-based products who use methanol as base ingredient. By a notification the government declared methanol to be “liquor” for the purposes of the Sindh Abkari Act of 1878. The fees were likely to yield about Rs1,000 million to the provincial exchequer.

The petitioners’ counsel, including Advocate Qadir H. Sayeed, however, argued that the charging section of the 1878 Act related to “duty,” not to “fee.” The duty envisaged by the law was to be imposed on “excisable articles,” which included only alcoholic liquor fit for human consumption. Methanol being “a deadly poison,” the counsel submitted, could not fall within the definition of any drink fit for human consumption.

The counsel also pointed that the government had levied excise duty and infrastructure fee on methanol under the 1878 Act through various notifications issued in exercise of the power of delegated legislation. The notifications were successfully challenged in the Sindh High Court. Substantial damage had been done to the formaldehyde industry by arbitrary notifications bringing methanol within the definition of “liquor.”

Allowing the petitions, the bench comprising Justice Zahid Kurban Alavi and Justice Sarmad Jalal Osmany observed: “To bring methanol within the ambit of the Act and to call it liquor is a creation of the (excise and taxation) department with clear malafide intention or perhaps it is a clear example of apathy that prevails in all government departments where notifications are issued without any consideration whatsoever not only of their implications but even without considering the contents of the said notifications.”