March 16, 2008	Sunday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 7, 1429

ISLAMABAD, March 15: The Pakistan People’s Party on Saturday criticised the decision of slashing the Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP) budget by Rs50 billion to finance the government’s day-to-day affairs.

“The PSDP funding should not be touched. It has already been abused beyond limits,” said Sherry Rehman, central information secretary of the PPP, in a statement.

Ms Rehman said: “The eight years of regime’s term in office makes a case study of lavish living, misplaced priorities and heavy costs resulting from an incompetent and unaccountable system of governance.”

She said the regime had no right to cut the PSDP allocation.“Why should funds be withdrawn from public development account when the president continues to spend Rs316 million on his palace every year, the NAB continues to claim around Rs900m from the national exchequer and the regime continues to stay unaccountable for allowing corrupt elements to wreak havoc with the wheat stock,” she said. The PPP leader described the proposed decision as a “shocking disgrace” in the light of the fact that development allocation was being snatched away from a public that was already grappling with over 15 per cent food inflation rate, one of the highest current account deficits in the history, and an economy that depended on remittances and foreign aid to survive another day.

“It is most atrocious that the public is being made to pay the price for the blunders and corruption of the last regime, which had a non-representative and unaccountable structure anyway,” she said.

Ms Rehman called for the outgoing caretaker set-up to refrain from taking decisions that would affect the work of the incoming PPP-led government. “The caretaker government would do well to leave important decisions to the newly-elected representatives that have been mandated by the public to run the country,” she said.

She said the new government reserved the right to review all decisions made by the caretaker regime, which had essentially acted as an extension of the PML-Q government.