FAISALABAD - All Pakistan Textile Processing Mills Association (APTPMA) Chairman Engr Rizwan Ashraf felicitated Finance Minister Asad Umar and Prime Minister Imran Khan for presenting a progressive, balanced, business-friendly, investment-friendly and peoples-friendly mini budget for the year 2018-19, despite economic crisis, enormous odds and resource constraint, which is a healthy augury for Pakistan and right steps in the right direction.
The Chairman APTPMA observed, with certain amount of satisfaction that a number of positive corrective measures and incentives have been envisaged in the FM’s budget speech, e.g., removal and reduction of customs and regulatory duties on import of industrial raw materials, removal of super tax, payment of sales tax refunds through promissory notes, elimination of withholding tax on banking transaction, abolition of super tax, facility of filing of withholding tax statement on half yearly instead of monthly, exemption of tax for manufacturing of equipment for renewable energy, reduction of loan tax for former. All these positive measures and incentives would go a long way towards ameliorating and energizing our exports, industrial, corporate, private, agriculture sectors, create investments and job opportunities and business activities in our country.
Concluding, the APTPMA Chief expressed satisfaction that the Finance Minister has announced and assured in his budget speech to resolve the longstanding matter of Gas Infrastructure Development Cess (GIDC) which will reduce the acute problems of liquidity crunch faced by the textile processing industry. He assured the PM Imran Khan and FM Asad Umer of the full cooperation and unstinted support of the textile processing sector e.o.m.
On the other hand, Faisalabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry (FCCI) President Syed Zia Alumdar Hussain hailed the Finance Supplementary (Second Amendment) Bill-2019 terming it business friendly.
Talking to media persons at FCCI here on Thursday, he said the government had put the national economy on right track by mobilising available resources and facilitating the manufacturing sector.
He particularly appreciated the Federal Minister for Finance Asad Umar and said that he remained in touch with the business community to take positive policy measures for the industrial uplift.
He congratulated the print media industry that was one of the beneficiaries of the current budget as the government had allowed duty free import of news print.
He specifically appreciated the reduction in income tax for agriculture, housing and agriculture financing from 39 percent to 20 percent.
He said that another positive step announced in this budget was reduction in taxes on marriage halls from Rs20,000 to Rs5,000 only.
He said waiving off withholding tax on bank transactions for tax filers was also a welcoming step of the government and it would give relief to small traders.
He said that main focus of the government was on ease of doing business as interest rate had been trimmed for the industrial sector.
The only item on which taxes had been increased was the import of luxurious automobiles, he added.
He hoped that measures taken by the government would strengthen the confidence of tax payer as now they would file only two statements in a year instead of filling statements on withholding tax every month.
Regarding energy sector, he said the government had now allowed import of the equipment for manufacturing of solar panels and wind turbines without any tax. Similarly, the machinery would also be zero rated for Special Economic Zones.
FCCI Vice President Engineer Ihtasham Javed said that this was people friendly supplementary budget in real terms. He also termed it a reforms package and hoped that soon people from every walk of life would harvest its fruits.