May 18, 2007	Friday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 01, 1428

ISLAMABAD, May 17: The management of an office complex has warned its tenants for huge fines if their employees are caught smoking anywhere other than the designated smoking areas, sources told Dawn.

Smoking in banned in all indoor public places in the country to protect the health of non-smokers.

The Evacuee Trust Board, which owns the Evacuee Trust Complex building and is responsible for its security, issued the warning here on Thursday, possibly in reaction to a recent fire incident.

On Tuesday afternoon, a smoker threw a cigarette butt from the third floor of the building that landed in a heap of garbage and empty crates, close to the air-conditioning plant and started a fire.

Soon thereafter, fire alarm bells, installed all over the building, started ringing. Mr Abid informed the City fire brigade about the fire at 2:30pm and which rushed to the spot but the flames had been controlled by a fireman present inside the building before it could spread.

Alerted by this close call, the management of the Evacuee Trust Complex (ETC) issued the warning in which it has asked all companies located in the building to direct their employees to restrict smoking to smoking lodges specially built for this purpose and refrain from smoking in any other area of the building, including offices, lavoratories, elevators or corridors, as they were strictly no-smoking areas.

The ETC management has warned of imposing a financial penalty on persons caught smoking outside these smoking lodges.

The management further said that in future, the company whose employee was found indulging in breach of this directive would be held responsible if any damage was caused by a fire as a result of their negligence.

The building has three smoking lodges —one each on the first and third floors, which are air-conditioned and have flat screen TVs and another one in the garden area just outside the building near it main gate.

More than 1,500 persons work in various offices located in the building, including, the ministry of information technology (IT), Pakistan Tobacco Company, Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB), LMKR, IT offices of foreign companies and a large number of call centres that work round the clock.