ISLAMABAD: To clear salary arrears of Rs505 million of Pakistani Steel Mills’ (PSM) employees, Senate Standing Committee on Industries has sent a resolution to the upper house in this regard.
The suggestion was put forth by Chairman of the Committee Senator Hidayatullah, reported an English daily.
And Senator Taj Haider recommended to the committee that should push for restoration of gas supply to PSM for processing of available stocks of steel bars, which would be sufficient to pay a few months of salaries to the employees.
He added, once the value-addition to stocks of steel bars gets concluded, gas supplies to PSM could be disconnected.
Giving his remarks over CFO PSM Mian Asad Haya-ud-Din’s statement, Mr. Haider said PSM had a large quantity of bars for manufacturing coil whose estimated worth could be around Rs4.5 billion.
But no decision could be reached over the issue during the meeting and committee was apprised employee salaries valued at Rs380 million a month had been disbursed by Finance Division after getting permission from Economic Coordination Committee (ECC) and the Cabinet.
Also, it came to the fore that employees had been receiving net salaries since June 2013 after ECC’s approval, but summary for disbursement of salaries for October and November 2017 was drafted on basis of their gross salary
And the Privatization Committee (PC) has obtained the summary and audit report of PSM employees and their salaries, while the mill has been instructed to sell its scrap to meet immediate financial requirements.
And the parliamentary panel decided PC should forward the summary of Rs505 million a month as gross salary to ECC after Senator Joint Secretary Finance Zahoor Ahmad who is also a board member at PSM, stated it had no issue over payment of gross salaries to the employees.
The meeting highlighted it was the government’s prerogative to pay Rs10 billion of provident fund and gratuity to PSM employees, which had been utilized by its management unlawfully.
It was also mentioned that the government’s top priority was to pay Rs10bn of provident fund and gratuity, etc. to the PSM employees that were used by the Steel Mills management unlawfully.
