LAHORE: The Supreme Court on Sunday directed Barrister Aitzaz Ahsan and other lawyers representing bottled water companies to sit together and come up with a workable plan to rationalise purchasing price of groundwater.

Earlier, chief executive officers of different bottled water companies appeared before a two-judge bench at the SC’s Lahore registry seized with a suo motu case against extraction of groundwater by these companies.

Heading the bench, Chief Justice Mian Saqib Nisar regretted that the water selling companies had been using groundwater almost free for years. “Now time has come to pay back to this country,” he told Barrister Ahsan, the counsel for Nestle mineral water company.

CJP orders forensic audit of mineral water company and appoints an expert to complete the task in 15 days

The chief justice observed that the court wanted to regulate groundwater extraction by every industry like it did in the case of the cement industry.

Justice Ijazul Ahsan, a member of the bench, pointed out that the purchasing price of groundwater being paid by the companies in Pakistan was the lowest in the world.

Mr Ahsan argued that the companies selling bottled water were different from other industries as they extracted groundwater and purified it before selling it to people. However, he said, other industries released polluted water after using the groundwater.

Justice Ahsan noted that Nestle earned an average profit of Rs6 billion from bottled water business, but it was not willing to pay a rational price for extracting groundwater.

However, the counsel insisted that the amount quoted by the bench was not profit but sale of the company.

Chief Justice Nisar told Mr Ahsan that the court would order the government to also waive the existing price of water (0.4 paisa per liter) as a charity if his client/company was not able to pay a rational price. He directed Nestle to deposit a bank surety of Rs1 billion when Barrister Ahsan sought one-month time for deliberations with the stakeholders and government authorities to rationalise the water price.

“It is better to ask them to take their all investment back to Switzerland,” the counsel responded to the chief justice’s offer.

Chief Justice Nisar asked the counsel not to exploit the situation by saying that foreign investors would be discouraged in the country following judicial proceedings. “One cannot escape regulations being a foreign investor,” he said.

The chief justice regretted that the conduct of the companies showed they did not want to contribute to the country’s economy. He observed that the water was a precious natural source, but would become rare for future generations if not preserved and regulated.

The chief justice ordered a forensic audit of Nestle and appointed Kaukab Jamal Zubairi, an expert in auditing, ignoring reservations of Barrister Ahsan on the expert.

The counsel insisted that the task should be given to one of top four chartered accountancy firms, saying a recent audit report on Pakistan Kidney & Liver Transplant Institute conducted by Mr Zubairi had grave factual errors.

However, the chief justice rejected the request and directed Mr Zubairi to complete the audit within 15 days. He also instructed his staff to randomly purchase bottles of known mineral water companies for their analysis.

Before concluding the proceedings, the chief justice reminded the lawyers that Bahria Town and other housing societies would soon be taken to task for using groundwater free of cost and selling it to their residents. He advised Mr Ahsan to come well prepared at the next hearing of a separate case wherein he held brief of Bahria Town.

Published in Dawn, September 17th, 2018