KARACHI, May 26: The Pakistan People’s Party on Thursday condemned the move to privatize PTCL, saying that the government’s privatization programme as a whole did not represent aspirations of the people.

“The move to privatize PTCL is a conspiracy against the country and its people, and a criminal method to benefit the cronies of the administration by selling away to them rapidly expanding sectors of the national economy along with their infrastructures at throw-away prices,” Taj Haider, information secretary of PPP said in a statement issued from Bilawal House here on Thursday.

He said that the government was creating a great security risk by handing over the entire communications network to foreigners, elaborating that in an emergency situation, the breakdown of the communications network even for a few minutes could result in a disaster. The governments should protect the communication network against any damage or sabotage instead of leaving it at the mercy of multinational capitalism, he advised.

“Selling off the PTCL would be much greater crime than snatching away the workers’ right to work,” he maintained.

Mr Haider said that instead of running the public sector units efficiently, the government was arguing that these units were being disposed of to the private sector in order to reduce load on the exchequer.

However, he pointed out, the PTCL was an organization which, in spite of the government’s open patronage of multinational companies in the telecommunication sector, had been contributing huge amounts as tax and non-tax revenues to the national exchequer.

“The government, which is levying backbreaking taxes on petroleum and its products, thus greatly damaging the national production and economy. One must realize that the PTCL has already earned Rs22 billion profits in the first nine months of this fiscal year, and the profit this year is expected to touch RS30 billion. The profit makes 50 per cent of what the government is collecting as taxes on petroleum and its products.”

He predicted that PTCL profits were bound to inflate very fast due to the rapid expansion of telecommunications across the world. Gifting away these revenues to multinationals would create a huge revenue gap, he cautioned.

In this era of tough international competition, this administration which had already handed over the financial sector to foreign multinationals, was clearly planning to destroy all important sectors of our economy and reduce Pakistan to a market of cheap labour and raw material for multinationals, “which have become the East India companies of the 21st century,” he said.