Govt’s writ to be ensured in Karachi

KARACHI:-

                      (Agencies) - Sindh Home Minister Manzoor Hussain Wassan asserted on Tuesday that the government’s writ would be ensured in Karachi at every cost, saying the Sindh government could take firm steps to maintain law and order in the business hub city, but its aim was to take all stakeholders along while taking important decisions.

“I can take strict measures to restore peace in Karachi. But my purpose is to take all stakeholders with me because people hailing from different races, sects, languages are living in Karachi,” asserted Wassan while talking to the media.

He said it was the vision of President Asif Ali Zardari to take along all parties for the sake of peace and that it was in the interest of all inhabitants of Sindh. Wassan, while admitting that “Karachi is a den of illegal weapons”, contended that some miscreants had been creating trouble in the city since 1985. “Karachi has to be cleansed of illegal weapons.”

The minister told reporters that law enforcement agencies had rounded up over 100 suspects during a search operation in various neighbourhoods in Karachi, adding that arms and ammunition had also been retrieved from the miscreants apprehended from Gulistan-e-Johar. He claimed that the government was trying for effective implementation of the writ of law and elimination of criminal and unscrupulous elements. “It is due to this approach that action has been initiated, since Monday evening, against those creating law and order situation.”

He said that the search operation would continue and investigations were underway to identify the real culprits behind the recent mayhem.

The minister said that Karachi was the hub of business, therefore, peace in the mega city was vital for improving image of Pakistan in the world. The government, he maintained, supported commissionerate system in the province but as the people were not satisfied with the “black law” of dictator Pervez Musharraf, it should be changed.

In reply to a question, Wassan said the government would never allow germination of any sense of insecurity among the people of Sindh. The ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) had rendered great sacrifices for the cause of Sindh, he averred while saying, “PPP’s share of sacrifice for Sindh is much more than any other political party.”

Meanwhile, US Consul General William J Martin, during a meeting with Manzoor Wassan at his (Wassan’s) residence on Tuesday, said that the United States would provide updated gadgets to the Sindh government for maintenance of peace in the province, particularly in Karachi.

The US diplomat said that cooperation and coordination in other sectors would also be offered to the provincial government.

Briefing the media on his meeting with the US consul general, Wassan said the US official noted that peace was crucial for the business hub of Pakistan.

Wassan told Martin that peace had to be restored in Karachi to dispel the negative impression created on foreign investors and international community in general about the city.

The Sindh home minister asserted that there were drug mafia, land mafia and other criminal elements who were responsible for law and order situation in the province

PSO records Rs 14.7b earnings after tax

ISLAMABAD:-

                           Pakistan State Oil (PSO) posted record results for the financial year 2011 and announced an after tax earnings of Rs14.7 billion as compared to earnings after tax of Rs9.05 billion during the previous financial year. These results were declared after PSO’s Board of Management (BoM) convened on Tuesday at PSO House to review the company’s performance over the fiscal year 2010-11.Despite financial challenges posed by the ever increasing circular debt and the economic slow down, PSO maintained its position as the market leader with a market share of 78.2 per cent and 54.4 per cent in the Black Oil and White Oil segments respectively, thereby contributing to an overall market share of 65.6 per cent. PSO sold 12.6 million tons of POL products in FY11 with net sales revenue growing to Rs975 billion in comparisons to Rs877 billion in the previous year. The BoM declared a final cash dividend of Rs 2 per share in addition to the already paid interim dividends at Rs8 per share. Earnings per share also registered an improvement to Rs. 86.17 per share from Rs52.76 per share last year.While expressing their confidence in the strategic vision and managerial skills of the PSO management, the Board nevertheless expressed serious concern on the spiralling receivables which stood at Rs138.2 billion as of August 9, 2011. They observed that the financial costs associated with servicing this debt coupled with consistent delays in payment from the power sector continued to hurt the overall profitability of the company. The BoM also directed that efforts be made to reduce the impact of the burgeoning financial costs through constant pursuit for recovery of receivables from the power sector entities as well as from the Government of Pakistan.

Govt may opt for review petition

ISLAMABAD:-

                          Two days after the announcement of apex court’s judgment regarding reinstatement of Zafar Ahmad Qureshi, Additional Director General Federal Investigation Agency, to carry out investigation of the cases in NICL scam forthwith and complete the inquiry expeditiously the Interior Ministry seemed perturbed by the verdict, has started making efforts to delay the implementation. Sources told TheNation that Interior Secretary Khawaja Saeed Akbar on Wednesday held a meeting with Additional Attorney General K K Agha in his office at the Supreme Court building.

Though agenda of the meeting could not be ascertained, yet a senior advocate of the Supreme Court stated that might be the government was considering to file a review petition on the judgment instead of implementing it in letter and spirit, as directed. When this scribe contacted the Additional Attorney General on his mobile phone for the confirmation of the news, he just said: “I don’t want to comment on it,” and disconnected the call. The Supreme Court on Monday had quashed the federal government’s order of July 4, 2011, suspending Zafar Qureshi from service.

DG FIA Tehseen Anwar Shah, ADG FIA Zafar Qureshi and other government authorities have been directed to ensure that public money, sent abroad, is brought back. The DG FIA and other relevant authorities were ordered not to create hindrance in the investigation being conducted by Zafar Qureshi under the directives of this court.

In the prevailing political scenario, the Pakistan People’s Party government does not want investigation in the NICL multi-billion scam in which PML-Q leader Pervaiz Elahi’s son Moonis Elahi and other big names including the PPP’s own minister Makhdoom Amin Fahim have come up being carried out by Zafar Qureshi.

The political analysts say that the PML-Q has joined the government so that the investigation against Moonis Elahi is halted. Zafar Qureshi has collected incriminating evidence against Mohsin Warraich, Habibullah Warraich, Moonis Elahi and Raja Muhammad Ali. He has also succeeded in obtaining information from Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA), UK, about the bank account of Moonis Elahi with EFG Private Bank Ltd. worth £1,138,792.53, in the name of a company owned by Moonis and another account in Barclays Bank in the name of Beenish Khan, wife of Mohsin Habib Warraich, worth £ 102,307.63 (transferred from the account in EFG Private Bank Ltd). The Supreme Court in the judgment authored by Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry has ordered that in pursuance of its order on 13.7.2011 no action shall be taken against Zafar Qureshi without prior approval of this court. The FIA investigation team, already been assisting him, would join him as team-mates. The Court vide order dated 1.7.2011 suspended the operation of notification dated 18.4.2011, whereby services of Zafar were withdrawn as additional DG FIA

Haqqani accuses US of acting with ‘gun blazing’

Haqqani accuses:-

                            Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington has accused the US of acting in a trigger-happy manner, alienating ordinary Pakistanis by the mission to kill Osama bin Laden.

“When the Americans come into Pakistan in a military fashion, unilaterally with guns blazing, essentially they are creating fear amongst the populous, which instead of looking upon them as friends starts being suspicious,” Husain Haqqani said in an interview with Washington’s WTOP radio. The Navy Seal raid in May has caused intense anger in Pakistan, where the military and civilian leadership were given no advance warning for fear the plans would be leaked. Relations were already at a low after the US asked that a covert CIA agent arrested in January after shooting dead two Pakistani men in Lahore be released and given diplomatic immunity. A third victim was killed by a four-wheel drive vehicle sent to rescue Raymond Davis, the spy.

Since then American diplomats have complained they face harassment in Pakistan and delays in obtaining visas.

Haqqani said the two episodes had escalated levels of distrust but that the two had to try to rebuild relations. “There are enough suspicions about the US in Pakistan already,” he said.

“There is a lot of negativity, which the US needs to fight to change public opinion and win over hearts and minds, but in a circumstance like that, to do something like this, results in more negativity.”

150 villages to get Sui gas soon

HAFIZABAD :–

                             PML-Q MNA Liaqat Abbas Bhatti has assured the locals villagers that the government would provide all sort of facilities at their doorsteps. He was addressing sui gas supply inauguration ceremony in Nawan Manika here the other day.

He said that the project had cost Rs1.5million. He further said that federal government has approved sui gas supply to 150 villages in Tehsil Pindi Bhattian during the current financial year.

He said that the government has allocated Rs250.0 million in this respect.

Rs250m REleased: The Punjab government has released Rs250 million under the Development Package for the district, it was officially learnt here. According to the package, Rs70.338 million would be spent on Jalalpur Bhattian-Sukhke Road metalling, Rs75 would be spent on the embankment of River Chanab from Qadirabad Barrage, Rs99.992 for the metalling of Chak Chattha-Qadirabad Colony Road, Rs4.080 for Sports and gymnasium at Hafizabad, Rs51.414 has already been spent for the project. Similarly, Rs21 million would be spent on the installation of water filtration plants in Lalke, Ramke Chattha, Sooianwala, Kolo Tarar

Zafar to complete NICL probe before Sept 30

ISLAMABAD:-

                          The investigation team of Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) probing National Insurance Company Limited (NICL) scam believes that Zafar Ahmad Qureshi will complete the investigation of the case before his retirement till September 30 if the government issued formal notification of his restoration early, an insider in FIA informed TheNation.

The government till Wednesday did not implement on the Supreme Court’s order even after the passage of three days that required issuance of a notification for the withdrawal or cancellation of earlier government orders of July 4 suspending Qureshi. Consequently, Zafar Qureshi could not resume his duties as chief investigator officer in the scam, TheNation learnt reliably.

However, the sources in the Interior Ministry revealed that the government might file a review petition in the Supreme Court against its orders resorting to Zafar Qureshi as Additional Director General FIA and Chief investigator officer in NICL scam to gain more time till September 30, the day he will reach the age of superannuation. Sources close to Qureshi claim that he is determined to complete the investigations of the multibillion mega corruption scandal till September that involved Moonis Elahi, member Punjab Assembly and son of Pervaiz Elahi

Want to Start a Company in the World's Sixth-Most Populous Country? Time to Move to Pakistan.

I recently returned from a reporting trip to Pakistan, one of the most fascinating countries I’ve ever visited. My first story, “Into the Fray,” ran in the July 20 issue of Forbes. It’s a profile of Monis Rahman, an entrepreneur who was born in Lahore and educated in the U.S., where he started a tech company during the height of the dot-com bubble. After running out of money in 11 months— and unable to raise more— Monis realized that if he started another venture, he would need to be hyper-vigilant about managing expenses. To do so, he took a drastic step, selling everything he owned and moving back to Lahore. Read below to find out how he did it, and whether his bet paid off.

During my trip, I had the privilege of meeting with members of the Lahore chapter of The Indus Entrepreneurs, a networking group for entrepreneurs from the region. We spoke at great length about the challenges and opportunities facing entrepreneurs in Pakistan, the world’s sixth-most populous country. High on their list of grievances was the absence of a strong rule of law: Entrepreneurs have limited legal recourse if a competitor steals their IP, or an investor violates a contract. Pakistani entrepreneurs also struggle to attract talent, both because they can’t offer new hires equity and the prospect of big IPO, a la U.S. startups, and people working outside of Pakistan often refuse to relocate there, due to safety concerns. VCs, angels and incubators are nonexistent, and banks rarely give commercial loans. But for entrepreneurs like Monis and many other people I interviewed, the promise of doing business in Pakistan outweighs the frustration. The country has over 187 million people, a nascent online economy, and—for startups—limited competition from big multinationals.
I could spend days writing about what it felt like to travel alone in Pakistan as a blond, female American, a month after U.S. forces killed Osama Bin Laden. The very fact that I got there was something of a miracle, courtesy of the consulate staffer in D.C. who agreed to give me a journalist visa. I’ll write about my trip in subsequent blog posts. For now, enjoy Monis’s story and, as always, feel free to comment below.
In the game of can-you-top-this entrepreneurial hardship–who slept the least, whose office was tiniest, who choked down the most Ramen noodles–Monis Rahman holds some formidable trump cards.
Four years ago Rahman, a serial entrepreneur, launched Rozee.pk, now Pakistan’s largest jobs website, with 500,000 unique visitors a month. While Rahman was raising money in 2007, terrorists bombed the homecoming procession of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. The Pakistani government subsequently suspended its constitution and declared a state of emergency. (A gunman assassinated Bhutto the following month.) When one of Rahman’s potential investors called to express his firm’s misgivings, Rahman e-mailed him a “Top Ten Reasons to Invest” list. Reason number nine was: “‘We’re headquartered in Lahore, where there haven’t been any blasts,’” he recalls. “Then I pressed ‘send.’ The next day in Lahore, the high court was bombed.”
Welcome to the Wild East of Web prospecting. Over tea on a 102-degree morning in Lahore, Rahman explains why now is the time to invest in Pakistan, the world’s sixth-most-populous country, with 187 million people and plenty of inexpensive labor. Obstacles abound, starting with the fact that only 17% of Pakistanis have Internet access. The country also suffers from low literacy rates, massive corruption, frequent blackouts and a weak judicial system.
“You tend to hear the worst 5% of the Pakistan story 95% of the time,” says Rahman, 41. “There’s a perception arbitrage, and it’s providing a window of opportunity for entrepreneurs.”

Rahman was born in Lahore but spent his childhood in the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, where his father worked as an urban-planning advisor for the United Nations. He studied engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and then helped develop the Itanium microprocessor chip at Intel. That experience led to his first venture, a chip-design consulting firm that he abandoned after a year, seduced by the dot-com boom. In 1999 Rahman and a partner started a company that installed cameras in day care centers, allowing parents to watch the video streams online in real time. Edaycare.com attracted $2.5 million from investors, including Ron Conway, an early backer of Google and PayPal. A year later the men ran out of money, forcing them to sell the company for stock that was ultimately worthless

After living on consulting gigs for four years, Rahman–inspired by the success of Friendster.com–decided to start a social networking site for Muslims in the United States and United Kingdom. He named it Naseeb.com, or “destiny” in Urdu, Arabic and most other languages in the Muslim world. “I decided not to go head-on as a matchmaking site,” says Rahman. “‘Dating’ has a negative stigma from a Muslim viewpoint.” There was a dating hook, though: Users could fill out a personality test with questions about whether they drank alcohol and how often they prayed–topics Muslims often discuss before they marry, says Rahman. Intrigued, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman invested $25,000, as did Mark Pincus and Joe Kraus. (The latter two founded Zynga and Excite, respectively.)
To conserve cash Rahman moved back to Pakistan and into his parents’ house, where he converted a guest room into an office. (He registered his parent company, Naseeb Networks, in the U.S. to make it easier to raise money and subleased a small office in San Jose, Calif.) This time he spent only $60,000 in total startup costs, in part by doing some of the initial programming himself. To prime the market, he used equity in the company to buy the electronic greeting card site eidmubarak.com, which Muslims used to send cards for Eid, a Muslim holiday. Three thousand people from the site’s 1-million-strong mailing list signed up immediately. Annual memberships cost $40, and by 2005 Naseeb.com was generating $300,000 in revenue.
Rahman soon needed more programmers and support staff, and buying ads in local newspapers was expensive. So he decided to build a “quick and dirty” job site to post his own job openings. Other local companies noticed, and Rahman agreed to post their ads for free to help boost Naseeb’s traffic. He offered the largest companies the ability to search for résumés, as well as software to power their own company job boards and the right to post their logos on the front page of his new site. He named it Rozee–which, roughly translated, means “Blessed Livelihood.”
By 2007 Rozee.pk was generating more traffic than Rahman’s thinly veiled matchmaking site. He used Naseeb’s proceeds–and $2 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and ePlanet Ventures–to hire salespeople to go after large corporate clients, most of which still advertised job openings in newspapers. Today 5,000 companies actively post openings on Rozee.pk, paying between $29 for a single ad and up to $20,000 for a suite of services. (For now Rahman isn’t focusing on Naseeb.)
Bartering is a big part of Rahman’s low-cost strategy. Three hundred rickshaw drivers in Lahore use Rozeebranded vinyl wheel covers and glow-in-the-dark stickers that Naseeb provides for free. Rahman convinced Sign Source, an advertising agency, to promote Rozee on 300 baggage trolleys in the Karachi airport in exchange for helping the company build a website that tracks the availability of outdoor media, like billboards. “We have to measure advertising dollars very carefully because it’s easy to spend and not recuperate,” says Rahman.
Huge short-term challenges remain. Turnover on Rahman’s 45-person sales staff drains capital: For every three salespeople he hires and trains, only one stays on for more than a few months. Then there’s the matter of collecting payment. Only 10% of customers–contributing 5% of sales–pay online using credit cards, while 60% pay with checks and 20% pay with cash, mailing payments to one of the company’s four outposts. A Rozee.pk rickshaw also travels around Lahore and picks up checks and cash.
Tougher still will be avoiding the fate of Monster.com and other U.S. job sites that are gradually taking a backseat to LinkedIn, where employers conduct targeted searches through their own professional networks. “I think it’s a difficult business,” says Salim Ghauri, chief executive of software company Netsol Technologies, a Rozee.pk client. “If companies don’t get good service, they will find another way, because they can’t stop hiring. The biggest challenge is quality control, which is not that easy.”
Rather than go head-to-head with the big social networks, Rahman aims to join forces with them. When employers post a job on Rozee.pk, they can simultaneously broadcast it on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. “We’re prepared so that when the technology evolves here, as it has in the United States, we’ll be in a position where we already have a social graph on our site,” says Rahman.

Easier said than done, perhaps. Monster recently rolled out an application that lives on Facebook, giving users a place to interact with professional contacts, without sharing photos and other personal details. In July LinkedIn prevented users of the application from inviting their contacts directly from LinkedIn.
Rahman says that Naseeb Networks pulled in $1 million in sales last year and turned “cash-flow positive” in March. He wants to mount a broader assault on the Middle East this year. “If I want to get bigger from a market-size perspective, I need to move beyond Pakistan,” he declares.
That means more turbulence ahead–and, chances are, more ways to win that can-you-top-this game.