October 26, 2003	Sunday	Sha’aban 29, 1424

ISLAMABAD, Oct 25: The government is likely to develop consensus among stakeholders for excluding three major electronic appliances from the negative list under Afghan Transit Trade (ATT).

A senior official told Dawn that a meeting would be held in this connection on Monday in the Economic Affairs Division to finalize the decision. The meeting would be attended by representatives from ministries of Industry, Commerce and Central Board of Revenue (CBR) along with relevant stakeholders.

The tax authorities on the direction of Ministry of Commerce have suggested the government to exclude six items from the ATT negative list.

Of these six items, the official said, the ministry of industry was opposing the exclusion of three items — refrigerators, air-conditioners, televisions and its parts — from the negative list fearing that these items would be smuggled back into the country causing considerable harm to the local industry.

The other three items proposed to be excluded from the list are video cassettes, razor blades and capacitors, the official said and added there was consensus among the government departments and the stakeholders on removal of these items from the list.

The Ministry of Industries said that unless an assurance was obtained from the Afghan government that these items were for the exclusive use in Afghanistan, the government should not exclude them from the negative list.

On the request of Afghan government Pakistan had recently excluded eight items from the negative list. Currently only 16 items are on the negative list.