ISLAMABAD - In a bid to give legal cover to the release of funds for Punjab Assembly elections, Minister for Finance Ishaq Dar yesterday tabled a bill in the National Assembly seeking the release of funds for holding elections of both the Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa assemblies.
The bill titled ‘Charged Sum for General Election (Provincial Assemblies of Punjab & Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) Bill 2023’ is aimed to give a picture that releasing funds would be tantamount to compromising on all revenues.
The chair later referred the matter to the concerned committee for further deliberation.
Dar believes this will help save money and hold elections freely, fairly and in a transparent manner. The clauses of the bill state, “Content of funds required for conducting elections in both the provinces shall be “an expenditure charged upon the Federal Consolidated Fund (FCF)”. Last week, the apex court had fixed May 14 as the date for the polls in Punjab and directed the federal government to release election funds worth Rs21 billion to the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) by April 10 for elections to the assemblies of Punjab and KP. The bill stated that it shall “override other laws” and have effect “notwithstanding anything contained in any other law, rules and regulations” when it was in force. It added that the proposed law would stand repealed once elections for both the assemblies were held, noting that the general elections and polls to the Sindh and Balochistan assemblies need not be held for it to be repealed. Minister for Finannce Ishaq Dar, speaking on the bill, came down hard on previous PTI government for mismanaging economic situation of the country. “Unsuitable policies of previous government badly affected over the economy,” he said assuring that the government had “employed all-out efforts to complete the IMF programme and the staff-level agreement would be signed soon.
