PIA staff protest privatisation

Karachi: Thousands of Pakistan’s national flag carrier’s employees Tuesday began two-hour protest rallies all over the country in a campaign against proposed selling of the company to a private owner.

The employees, including those from administration, engineering, technical, and aviation departments, gathered outside the Quaid-e-Azam International Airport in Karachi and shouted slogans against plan to privatise the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA).

In other cities, including Lahore and Islamabad, the PIA staff also demanded the government to rescind the recent presidential ordinance under which the PIA was transformed into a corporate entity from a state-owned corporation.

From Tuesday, the employees vowed they would continue their token protest for two hours daily until their demand was met. If not, they said, they would expand the sphere of their protest and go for complete shut down of the airline operation.

The government claimed that the move was aimed at restructuring and revamping PIA but later on Pakistan’s privatisation minister said the government planned to sell the PIA by mid-2016.

Mohammad Zubair, the minister for privatisation, said the government was likely to offload 26 per cent to strategic shares to the potential buyer.

Pakistan intended to market the PIA in the Middle Eastern, European and Chinese markets.

Meanwhile, Shujat Azeem, the adviser to the prime minister on aviation issues, resigned from his office after the Supreme Court barred him from taking any administrative action.

The PIA flight operation largely remained uninterrupted on the first day of the protest but the two international flights from Toronto to Karachi and Islamabad were reported to be postponed for another 24 hour. Reports said that the passengers who came to embark on the flights were told to wait till another day without assigning any reason.

The PIA is incurring billions of losses every year and its cumulative losses stood 268 billion rupees (Dh9.4 billion) in the last financial accounts. Some 16,000 employees are working in one of the largest state-owned companies of Pakistan.

The government subsides the losses from the national exchequer.