February 08, 2008	Friday	Muharram 29, 1429

SIALKOT, Feb 7: Local businessmen have been offered to establish mother units of their factories and industrial units at the Sialkot Export Processing Zone (EPZ) if they want availing prescribed incentives of any EPZ on their main factory premises elsewhere.

Export Processing Zones Authority (EPZA) Chairman Kamran Y Mirza made this offer at a meeting held at the Sialkot Chamber of Commerce and Industry (SCCI) here on Thursday to identify ways and means to revive the 17-year-old EPZ.

The local business community had established the 238-acre EPZ costing Rs184 million near Sambrial on a self-help basis in 1989.

Around 17 years on, only three factories have been established as yet, and the EPZ has not achieved the purposes of its establishment envisaged by its architects.

The EPZA chairman said it was high time for the industrialists to avail this unique offer and get all the EPZ incentives and facilities at their big industrial units and factories by establishing the mother units of their factories at the EPZ.

Participants of the meeting were told that the industrialists and exporters had already invested huge sums of money in establishing their main factories in and around the city precincts and as such were unable to shift their installations to the EPZ comparatively at a farther place and this was main cause hurdling the boost of the EPZ despite the passage of around two decades.

The EPZA and the SCCI also pledged to make all-out efforts to make the EPZ operational at the earliest.

Non-availability of incentives prescribed by EPZA is another factor affecting the EPZ project, leaving it non-operational yet.

SCCI President Dr Khurram Anwar Khwaja, EPZA Investment Director Farooq Ameen Qureshi, Muhammad Ashraf Wahla and Pakistan Sports Goods Manufacturers and Exporters Association (PSGMEA) former chairman Arif Mahmood Sheikh also spoke on the occasion.