Comment by Riaz Haq on December 25, 2013 at 10:35pm

Here's a report describing diverse holdings of Pakistani Fauji Foundation ranging from finance and food to energy, transport and and fertilizer:

KARACHI: The Fauji Group on Monday announced that it will acquire Al-Hamd Foods – a venture of Al-Hamd Group which has interests in textile, confectionery and foods – in a bid to diversify its business already weighty of fertiliser, cement, food, power generation, gas exploration, LPG marketing and distribution, financial services, employment services and security services.

The acquisition price has not been disclosed yet.

In a notice sent to the Karachi Stock Exchange, the Fauji Group said that on June 15, the company’s board of directors approved acquisition of 100% stake in Al-Hamd Foods, of which 75% will be held by Fauji Fertilizer Company (FFCL) and the rest (25%) by Fauji Foundation, as part of FFCL diversification drive to ensure sustained and multiple revenue streams.

In May, the Fauji consortium took over the charge of Askari Bank from the Army Welfare Trust, the previous owner, at a sale-purchase price of Rs24.32 per share.

The Fauji Group has been diversifying for the past few years, expanding its interests in all of the potential good buys they can find. Looking at the acquisitions and expansion it was making, it seems that the company wants to become a household name just like Engro.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 18th, 2013.

Comment by Riaz Haq on August 6, 2015 at 5:55pm

Pakistan’s army has taken the almost unheard of step of publicly shaming two retired generals for misusing funds, in a move many army-watchers applauded as a significant attempt by the country’s top general to clean up corruption in the all-powerful institution.

The two officers were punished for making disastrous investments totalling £25m through the National Logistics Cell (NLC), an army-run transport company which is part of a vast military commercial empire including property developments, cement plants and manufacturing interests.

In a statement late on Wednesday night the army said the former director general of the NLC, a retired major general called Khalid Zahir Akhter, had been dismissed from service and stripped of his rank, medals and pension.

Meanwhile, Muhammad Afzal Muzaffar, a retired lieutenant general, was given a lighter disciplinary measure of “severe displeasure”.

Both had been recalled back into service so they could be tried under military law.

“It is a major development because the military is perceived a sacred cow not subject to any accountability,” said Talat Masood, a retired lieutenant general. “It shows the changes that are taking place under General Sharif.”

Raheel Sharif was appointed as chief of army staff in 2013, a role considered to be at the tip of power in a country where the military controls a swath of the economy and calls the shots on many areas of policy nominally managed by civilian politicians.

Under Sharif’s predecessor, Ashfaq Kayani, an army investigation into the NLC case had been allowed to gather dust years after it was first exposed in 2009 by a parliamentary accounts committee.

A former official at the National Accountability Bureau, an anti-corruption watchdog, said Kayani had “intervened on several occasions” in the case.

By contrast Sharif had “instructed to dispose of the case on fast track for want of justice and transparency”, according to an army statement.

The reinvestigation ordered by Sharif found the two officers and one civilian “were indeed responsible for making incorrect decisions of investments in violation of NLC rules and regulations thereby causing losses to the organisation”.

According to an earlier inquiry the NLC piled up huge loses after using money borrowed from banks to invest in risky stocks between 2004-8.

Syed Adil Gilani, head of Transparency International Pakistan, an anti-corruption group, said the army normally keeps internal probes into senior officers secret to preserve morale at a time troops are engaged in bloody counterinsurgency operations against militant groups.

He said the army believes terrorism cannot be thwarted without steps being taken against the country’s vast criminal economy, which includes rampant “land grabbing” by property speculators.

“This is a signal to the civilians that they also need to tackle corruption or otherwise terrorism cannot be eliminated,” he said.

Sharif has also been credited with allowing investigations to proceed against an alleged £3m fraud committed by Elysium Holdings, a company owned by one of General Kayani’s brothers, which is accused of illegally selling certificates for allotments to build houses on land near Islamabad that it did not in fact own.

“No one would touch Kayani’s brothers unless the army chief OKs it,” said Hasan Askari Rizvi, a Lahore based political analyst. “[Sharif] wants to deal with issues that have become so public that they are damaging the image of the army.”

In line with many other analysts, Rizvi credits Shaif with making significant changes during his tenure, particularly his decision in June 2014 to finally send troops into the Taliban sanctuary of North Waziristan, despite opposition from civilian politicians.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/06/pakistan-army-shames-g...

Comment by Riaz Haq on April 13, 2021 at 1:08pm

UNDP: Elite privilege consumes $17.4bn of #Pakistan’s #economy. Top beneficiaries are corporate sector (tax breaks, cheap input prices, higher output prices, access to capital, land) – 2nd & 3rd biggest recipients of privilege are richest feudal landlords https://aje.io/dvkng

The UNDP’s Wignaraja noted that this creates a paradox where those responsible for doling out the privileges were also those who were receiving them.

----------------
The biggest beneficiary of the privileges – which may take the form of tax breaks, cheap input prices, higher output prices or preferential access to capital, land and services – was found to be the country’s corporate sector, which accrued an estimated $4.7bn in privileges, the report says.

The second and third-highest recipients of privileges were found to be the country’s richest 1 percent, who collectively own 9 percent of the country’s overall income, and the feudal land-owning class, which constitutes 1.1 percent of the population but owns 22 percent of all arable farmland.

Both classes have strong representation in the Pakistani Parliament, with most major political parties’ candidates’ drawn from either the feudal landowning class or the country’s business-owning elite.
----------

Economic privileges accorded to Pakistan’s elite groups, including the corporate sector, feudal landlords, the political class and the country’s powerful military, add up to an estimated $17.4bn, or roughly 6 percent of the country’s economy, a new United Nations report has found.

Released last week, the UN Development Programme’s (UNDP) National Human Development Report (NHDR) for Pakistan focuses on issues of inequality in the South Asian country of 220 million people.

The report uses the prism of “Power, People and Policy” to examine the stark income and economic opportunity disparities in the developing country.

“Powerful groups use their privilege to capture more than their fair share, people perpetuate structural discrimination through prejudice against others based on social characteristics, and policies are often unsuccessful at addressing the resulting inequity, or may even contribute to it,” says the report.

Kanni Wignaraja, assistant secretary-general and regional chief of the UNDP has been on a two-week “virtual tour” of Pakistan to discuss the report’s findings, holding talks with Prime Minister Imran Khan and other top members of his cabinet, including the ministers of foreign affairs and planning.

She says Pakistani leaders have taken the findings of the report “right on” and pledged to focus on prescriptive action.


“[In our remarks in meetings] we focused right in on where […] the shadows are, and what is it that actually diverts from a reform agenda in a country,” she told Al Jazeera in an exclusive interview.

“My hope is that there is strong intent to review things like the current tax and subsidy policies, to look at land and capital access.”

----------------------

The country’s powerful military, which has directly ruled Pakistan for roughly half of its 74-year history, was found to receive $1.7bn in privileges, mainly in the form of preferential access to land, capital and infrastructure, as well as tax exemptions.
The report noted, however, that Pakistan’s military is also “the largest conglomerate of business entities in Pakistan, besides being the country’s biggest urban real estate developer and manager, with wide-ranging involvement in the construction of public projects”.

“These things are not neatly separate entities,” said Wignaraja. “You do see some of… these are overlapping so you almost get a double privilege by the military. The minute in a country the military is a part of big business, it obviously doubles the issue and the problem.”

In a country like Pakistan, where the military continues to hold power over many aspects of governance, she warned that it would take “almost a social movement” to displace structures of power that were so entrenched.

Comment