ISLAMABAD: Ahmed Hassan Moughal President, Raffat Farid Senior Vice President and Iftikhar Anwar Sethi Vice President, Islamabad Chamber of Commerce & Industry have lauded the initiative of the Prime Minister of Pakistan for constituting a 22-member Council of Business Leaders (CBL) who would provide advice to the government for promoting trade and exports. However, they said that the government should include representatives of FPCCI and major Chambers of Commerce and Industry in the CBL to make it a broader representative body of private sector of the country.
They said that the business community was fully aware of the major challenges being faced by the economy and would support all initiatives of the government aimed at reviving the business and economic activities. They said that formation of CBL was a step in the right direction for economic revival in consultation with key stakeholders. They said that Chambers of Commerce and Industry were the true representatives of business community of respective regions as they represented all sectors of the economy. They said that the government should have included them in CBL for taking input from all key stakeholders for resolving issues and promoting business activities.
They further said that to know about the ground realities of trade, industry and other sectors of the economy, inclusion of Federation and Chambers was necessary instead of giving representation to a selected class of businessmen in the CBL. They said that the office bearers of trade bodies being the real stakeholders of business community were in a better position to convey true voice of the private sector to the government, help it in addressing key issues and making conducive policies for private sector.
The ICCI Office Bearers were of the view that induction of the actual stakeholders from business and industrial community in the council was necessitated by the fact that as they were well versed with real issues of business sector and were in a much better position to give suggestions and highlight repercussions of numerous policies directly or indirectly affecting the private sector.
They requested the Prime Minister to revisit the composition of CBL and consider giving representation to Federation and major Chambers of the country in it for achieving meaningful results from the constitution of this Council.
