RAWALPINDI, June 13: The Islamabad Electric Supply Company (Iesco) has warned the Rawalpindi Cantonment Board that their power supply will be cut off if they failed to clear their dues, Dawn has learnt.

The Iesco has sent several notices to the cantonment board, asking it to pay Rs140 million arrears. The RCB, however, has put forward counter claims of Rs462 million payable by the Iesco on different heads such as property tax, line, ground and lease rents as well as taxes on the power utility’s installations functioning within the board jurisdiction.

An Iesco official said the civic body had to pay arrears pending since 1994. Several meetings have been held between the two organizations on the issue, but the matter still remains unresolved.

Iesco has set June 30 deadline for recovery of about Rs180 million dues to be paid by different agencies and government departments.

The RCB chief executive officer, Khawaja Iftikhar Mir, denied the Iesco claims and counter-claimed that the power company had to pay Rs462 million in taxes to the board.

He maintained that Iesco was not a government department, but a public limited company and was supposed to pay all taxes to the cantonment board, which, he added, had been paying Rs5 million per month to the power company.

When asked whether the RCB had received disconnection notices from Iesco, he said he had no knowledge about such notices.

“They cannot disconnect our electricity supply. We have the legitimacy to resist. Rather they owe to us,” he added.

Iesco’s executive director, Brig Waseem Zafar, when contacted for comments, said the RCB had to pay Rs140 million in arrears to the company.

We have sent many disconnection notices to them, but there was no response and now after a few days we will be sending one final notice after which their electricity supply will be disconnected, he added.

He said Rs5 million per month payment included only those electricity charges that the cantonment board consumed every month. The arrears remain unpaid and are instead increasing, he added.

Brig Waseem denied that Iesco owed Rs462 million to the RCB. He said: “We don’t owe anything to them.

We are a government department. We are not supposed to pay any taxes.”

He denied charges of overbilling and said RCB was being charged on concessional rates instead of commercial.