ISLAMABAD, June 6: The counsel for the Privatisation Commission on Tuesday informed the Supreme Court of Pakistan that 4,457 acres of land of the Pakistan Steel Mills had not been assessed independently.
Concluding his arguments in the steel mills privatisation case, Advocate Sharifuddin Pirzada submitted that the said land would not be transferred to its new buyer and would revert to the government.
Responding to volleys of questions by judges of the apex court’s larger bench hearing petitions against lack of transparency in the deal, he stated that in his opinion the land would remain with the mills as long as it was operational; otherwise it would revert to the Sindh government. “Admittedly, the land was not valued separately by the evaluators,” he said.
“This is a very important statement you are making,” Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry observed.
Advocate General Sindh Mansoor Ahmed Khan, who had been asked on a previous hearing to produce the provincial government’s records regarding the mills’ land, submitted that the Sindh government had allotted 19,121 acres to the federal government in 1976 after negotiating a price of Rs5 for 0.76 square yard. The specific purpose was to establish the mills and to build a housing colony for its employees.
He said though the mills was the legal owner of the land, it did not enjoy free hold right over it.
Representing the three-member consortium which purchased the mills for Rs21.68 billion, Advocate Khalid Anwar argued that the entire 19,121 acres vested with the mills but his clients were claiming mutation of only 4,457 acres which housed the mills. They were not pressing for right over the remaining land, he explained.
The land had been and would remain in the name of the mills and its new buyer had every right to claim it according to the sale agreement, he pleaded.
However, the CJ observed that neither the expression-of-interest document suggested sale of 4,457 acres to the purchaser nor the land was taken into consideration while determining the worth of the mills.
“Had the land been included in it, the share price would have been different,” the CJ observed, adding the buyer could not get the land worth millions of rupee without paying for it.
However, Khalid Anwar pleaded that in December 2005, National Assembly’s standing committee was informed that the land was in the name of the mills. Besides, he said, bidders knew in advance that that the land was a part of the mills being auctioned.
He said vested interests hyped up the issue to create an impression that the mills was a gold bar or a diamond but was sold for a very cheap price. In fact, he argued, this mills was endemic with corruption and inefficiency. Decision to privatise it was prudent since the government badly needed Rs6 billion to continue its operations, he said, adding that the mills was “a 25 years old outdated, dysfunctional and defectively manufactured plant”.
He pleaded that the mills required a workforce of 6,000 employees but succeeding governments recruited extra 14,000 unskilled workers in violation of merit rules and taxpayers were made to share the additional burden, he contended.
The mills failed because it was marred with a culture of laziness and incompetence. Besides, during its 30 years of operations, the mills never paid dividend of a single penny, he claimed.
