Federal Minister for Finance Miftah Ismail has said that the government and allies are in favour of early elections but our tattered economy don’t allow us to conduct early polls. 

While talking to 24NewsHD Tv channel after reaching Heathrow Airport, London on Thursday, the finance minister said that Pakistan economy was in shreds that’s why he was heading to Washington. 

“We have to revive our relations with the IMF (to tinker our economy). That’s why I’m going to US,” Miftah said adding that the Imran Khan government had fueled poverty and unemployment in the country. He vowed to eliminate them. 

On the question of holding early elections as is demanded by government ally JUI Chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman, Miftah said that all allies including PML-N supremo Nawaz Sharif, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif were in favour of early polls, but our economy could not bear conducting election before time. 

He said one could easily determine the condition of our wobbly economy by seeing the levels of unemployment, poverty and ballooning of debts. He said for the economic resuscitation, establishment of a democratic dispensation was paramount. 

He said if talks with the IMF went well, then it would bring stability in the value of rupee. 

The finance minister pronounced that unlike previous Imran government, they would not indulge in the blame game and rectify economy. 

Rubbishing some media reports that suggest some cleavage between the PML-N government and PPP on the issue of distribution of ministries, Miftah said PPP people were friends and ‘some of them have come to London along with me’. 

Earlier, Finance Minister Miftah Ismail departed to America to hold talks with the International Monetary Fund for the release of $1billion tranche.

On his Twitter handle, Miftah wrote: “I am off to Washington DC to try and put back on track our IMF program that PTI and IK derailed, this endangering our economy. And more happily, after 3 years of being on ECL, I will get to travel to London on the way and meet my leader Mian Nawaz Sharif.”

https://twitter.com/MiftahIsmail/status/1516870378769035269

Addressing a presser on Wednesday, the federal finance minister Ismail declared that the Imran Khan government during its four-year stint had borrowed over Rs20,000 billion as loans but did not repay a single penny. He said this government would make all-out efforts to restore the Extended Fund Facility (EFF) programme with International Monetary Fund (IMF). “The government would do whatever was necessary to revive the programme,” he added.

He said the government could reduce public sector development spending with other necessary budgetary discipline arrangements. “We will restore the programme. If government had to tighten its belt, it will do so,” he said adding that no extra burden would be put on the people.

The funds wants government to take a number of steps to do away with subsidies extended by the previous government, especially the relief package aimed to provide electricity and fuel at subsidized rates announced by former prime minister Imran Khan to revive its EFF.

Miftah while denouncing the relief announced by Imran Khan on petrol and power prices, said that no sane foreign minister could have suggested such a thing. Bailing out former finance minister Shaukat Tarin who, he said, didn’t suggest such a thing, he said: ‘this subsidy was not a landmine rather it was an atom bomb’ and needed to be defused as soon as possible.

Reporter Waqas Azeem