COMMENTING about Nawaz Sharif’s business background, Khurram Husain in his article ‘Money and politics’ (April 14) mentioned: “Many others have remarked on the obvious observation that his family started as humble owners of a small steel mill until they were touched by the general’s hand in the early ‘80s.”

On migration to Lahore from Amritsar at the time of partition, the prime minister’s father, Mian Sharif, who was the eldest amongst his brothers, had established a small foundry at Sera-i-Sultan, near the railway road on a little plot. Being close to Lahore’s largest market of various iron and steel products at Brandrath Road, he got a wonderful opportunity of doing business.

Mian Sharif’s hard work and timely delivery of orders bore fruit and he generated enough money to acquire a large industrial plot behind the Kot Lakhpat railway station in the vicinity of Lahore and started operating the Ittefaq Foundry and Works Ltd in 1962.

I joined this company in the personnel department after its nationalisation in January 1972, which was named as Lahore Engineering and Foundry Ltd (LEFO). My father, who had joined Ittefaq Foundry in 1967, after his retirement from Pakistan Railways, was an engineer in one of its workshops.

The Ittefaq Foundry had three large workshops, a foundry, re-rolling mill and a furnace shop and employed around 2,000 workers. Ittefaq produced diesel engines, wheat threshers, rice threshers, cotton bailing pressers and even road rollers, besides manufacturing high quality mild steel bars.

The then government would request the managements of both BECO and Ittefaq to arrange plant tours of foreign dignitaries and trade delegations from various countries. According to my father, they were taken round the various manufacturing facilities by Nawaz Sharif.

It is, therefore, wrong to say that the Sharif family had a small mill prior to the 1980s. The Ittefaq business empire was built by Mian Sharif, who no doubt was an enterprising and a self-made person.

Parvez Rahim

Karachi

Published in Dawn, April 18th, 2016