10-point agenda reduced to eight

ISLAMABAD - Agreeing on appointing a one-person judicial commission to investigate into unjustifiable sugar price hike, the PPP and PML-N committees on Wednesday decided to put two critical issues of corruption and apex courts verdicts implementation on second priority. Since the two committees had already categorised the ten points of PML-N leader Nawaz Sharif by putting immediately doable on top priority and those that were not immediately doable on the second one. Making significant headway on rest of the eight points, the two committees during their meeting on Wednesday somewhat agreed upon putting these two issues of removing corrupt cabinet members and implementation on verdicts of the Supreme Court of Pakistan with the judgement on NRO on top of them on second priority. According to sources privy to the committees meeting, the PPP termed these two points as not immediately doable and therefore these were pushed to second priority. The PML-N, the sources added, did not oppose the contention of the PPP in a way silently agreeing to it. The sources told The Nation that the PPP had argued that a unanimously agreed upon definition of corruption would be required to proceed on these points. Secondly, the PPP side had pointed out that the removal of a minister from the cabinet on corruption charges could disqualify him as member of the Parliament. Talking to the media after the meeting, Finance Minister Abdul Hafeez Shaikh, who is also head of the governments parliamentary committee interacting with that of the PML-N, said that two sides had agreed upon a one-person judicial commission on sugar prices. He said that a retired judge of the Supreme Court or the High Court would be appointed in a day or two as the judicial commission to probe recent increase in the sugar prices. For prices in general, and petroleum products tariff in particular the committees were hammering out a mechanism that would be finalised soon, he said. Regarding the Accountability Bill, he said, the Committees would meet again next week to do away with the disagreements between the two parties on certain provisions of the draft. According to the Finance Minister, the two committees also agreed to finalise the parliamentary committee to be appointed by the Speaker National Assembly for appointment of independent Election Commissioner. Meanwhile, Ishaq Dar, head of the PML-N parliamentary committee, told reporters after the meeting that Governor State Bank of Pakistan presented two lists of written off loans. The Governor presented two lists to the committees including details of loans written off since 1971 to 2003 and 2004 to 2010, separately. The committees have asked the central bank to come up with more specific details of the respective written off loans. However, the SBP also informed the committees that it was not possible to differentiate which of the loans were written off on political grounds. Still Dar was hopeful and vowed to give good news soon to the public regarding the recovery of loans written off on political grounds. The committees would take up in their next meeting the issue of expenditures reduction both at the Centre and the provinces level.