ISLAMABAD, Nov 18: As the financial liabilities of Capital Development Authority have reached Rs40 billion mark, the authority’s high-ups are considering foreign visits aimed to attract investors in its real estate sector, an insider told Dawn on Tuesday.

In this connection, the CDA bigwigs are considering trips to United States, United Kingdom, Dubai and Malaysia to offer Islamabad’s plots to the investors.

The source said the authority had only Rs6 billion in its kitty and Rs2.8 billion were expected in revenue collection during the current fiscal year while it required Rs40 billion to meet its liabilities.

The CDA has to spend Rs12 billion on the ongoing projects, Rs6 billion on new projects, Rs7 billion on non-development expenditure, Rs13 billion collected from plot seekers of sector I-15 but spent on other projects, Rs2 billion contractors matured securities which it has to return after one year of completion of the projects. Besides, a sum of Rs2 billion was lost in the stock exchange crunch.

It is pertinent to mention here that the authority had depended on the sale of plots to fetch about Rs5 billion but the poor real estate market conditions have now faded the prospects. “We have fixed the auction date as November 25 but only four prospectuses have so far been sold,” an official of the authority said.

If the CDA team goes abroad seeking investors in the real estate business, there is no surety that it will achieve the desired results and the money spent on the visits will put further burden on it.

At present, not only Pakistan but also most of the countries including the US and the UK are facing acute financial crisis and CDA’s expectation in the prevailing circumstances seems to be unrealistic.

Meanwhile, a number of uplift projects proposed by Capital Development Authority are likely to be shelved due to the financial crunch.

It has been learnt that the authority had wrongly termed its current budget a surplus one with huge volume of development expenditure amounting to Rs21 billion and non-development expenditure of Rs5 billion.

“It was wrongly assumed that it would be a surplus budget, as there was actually a deficit of Rs5 billion and this gap is to be filled by auctioning plots,” the official said.