Govt announces to appeal decision in Int'l Court.

Byline: Fawad Yousafzai

Islamabad -- Pakistan announced on Monday it would appeal the international court decision of $6.2 billion damages in Rekodiq case.

The international court had asked Pakistan to pay $1.2 billion in damages to the power producers as a penalty in Karkey rental power case and $6.2 billion in damages in Rekodiq case, said Federal Minister for Energy Omar Ayub Khan while addressing a press conference here.

'Pakistan risk seizure of its assets in case it fails to pay the damages,' the minister told the media. Khan said that past governments were responsible for taking unwise decisions that resulted in the imposition of such damages against Pakistan.

The energy minister added that Pakistan faced a burden of Rs24,000 billion loans due to the flawed policies of the previous governments.

He was of the view that people should know who was responsible for burdening the country with such a huge amount of loans.

He accused the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) government of accumulating Rs29 billion in circular debt every month, which, he claimed, had been reduced to Rs10 billion since the present government came to power.

Responding to a query regarding the circular debt, the minister said the power producers had been paid 88 percent of the outstanding amount, and claimed the government would repay the entire circular debt in 2020.

Regarding the payment of Rs1.5 billion to Rosch power plant on account of capacity charges, he said the decision in this regard was taken by the Economic Coordination Committee (ECC) of the cabinet in 2017 during the tenure of PML-N government.

Khan said that governments in the past had also decided to run this power plant on RLNG, instead of indigenous gas. He said that previous governments did not pay a penny to the international power producers (IPPs).

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