ISLAMABAD, Jan 4: The ex-employees of Poly Vinyl Chloride (PVC) Ltd, a Sindh-based company privatized in the early 1992, have demanded of the government to pay their outstanding gratuity and other legal dues amounting to Rs50 million.

“The Privatization Commission has not yet paid our Rs50 million outstanding dues despite the passage of more than 13 years. Fifty-nine out the total 483 workers, who had accepted the government’s golden handshake scheme, have died waiting for their dues,” said Malik Mushtaq Elahi, general-secretary of PVC Ltd, in a statement issued here on Wednesday.

Due to the “faulty and non-transparent” privatization process, he said, families of the ex-employees of PVC were still suffering. Soon after controlling the affairs of the company, the buyer, Riaz Shafi, refused to honour the agreement signed by him and the Privatization Commission for the sale of PVC. He said the buyer informed the government that he could not pay the dues of the employees due to some financial crisis.

While fixing the value of the PVC’s assets, Mr Elahi said, the government had provided Rs220 million to the buyer in liabilities, besides arranging moratorium for him on loans from the State Bank of Pakistan.

According to clause 32 of the Privatization Commission Ordinance, he said, the commission could recover the amount of outstanding dues from new buyers through the high court. Besides, the government could also pay for the dues of the employees before privatizing a company, as the company was a state-owned before its privatization.

He said there were several other examples in which the government had paid the dues of the employees after the buyer of a company was unable to do so. However, in the case of PVC, the government had become dumb and blind and was not taking any steps to redress the issue.

According to the privatization agreement, Mr Elahi said, the Privatization Commission could take the case of non-payment of dues of the employees to the “sole arbitrator”, federal finance secretary. In the agreement, the buyer had promised of clearing the dues before November 30, 1992, but the poor employees and their families were still waiting for their money.

He said on the one hand, the Privatization Commission was claiming exercising “international best practises” in the privatization process and on the other it even could not settle the dues issue of the state-owned companies. He said now the employees were not only demanding the outstanding dues, but the outstanding dues plus interest for the last 13 years.