LAHORE, Aug 11: The Lahore Parking Company, a newly established autonomous wing of the City District Government of Lahore, started working on Saturday after the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan registered it on Friday under Section 32 of the Companies Ordinance 1984.

The first meeting of company’s board of directors was held at Town Hall on Saturday and was presided over by District Coordination Officer Noor-ul-Amin Mengal. MPA Hafiz Nauman, EDO (Finance) Muazzam Iqbal Sipra and EDO (Municipal Services) Khan Masood Tamana were also in attendance.

The meeting nominated Nauman and Mengal as chairman and vice chairman of the board, respectively. It allowed the company management to start work on initial assignments and decided unanimously that the DCO would soon send a summary to the Punjab government to seek a seed money of Rs200 million.

The company has been entrusted the task of regulating all parking lots and plazas of the city government, town municipal administrations, LDA, TEPA and other departments. It will be responsible for building new parking plazas in the city besides renovating the old parking lots.

“The CDGL decided to regulate parking lots/plazas after it received complaints of corruption against its public facility department officials during award of contracts and collection of parking fee,” company managing director Usman Ali Khan told Dawn.

He said as no one knew about the exact number of existing parking lots/plazas, contracts, fee collection and other matters, there were reports that officials were busy making money from this sector. He said the company under an agreement with the CDGL would takeover all parking lots being run by the CDGL or any other civic agency or department. “In the first phase, we will takeover the parking stands/plazas being run directly by CDGL’s public facility wing. Later, we will get control of other parking lots being run by LDA, TEPA, TMAs or any other department,” Khan added.

He said the company planned to conduct an in-depth study about number of existing parking lots, staff, new parking sites, technical and financial resources and future course of action.

He said under the newly designed organisational chart/structure the company would have three wings: planning, corporate and operations.

Talking about initial funding for the company, he said the company had no funds at hand and the CDGL would give the money required to run it.

To a question, he said it had been decided in principal not to merge CDGL’s public facility wing and its staff in the company.

Mengal said though the city had the potential of earning more than Rs1 billion from parking lots, CDGL’s public facility wing officials were only collecting Rs100 to Rs120 million annually.