Month: August 2020

ISLAMABAD: The Cabinet Committee on Privatisation (CCoP) on Friday approved planned divestment of seven percent government-owned shares in Oil and Gas Development Company Limited (OGDCL) and 10 percent shares in Pakistan Petroleum Limited (PPL) through public offerings. The CCoP meeting presided over by Adviser to Prime Minister on Finance and Revenue Dr Abdul Hafeez Shaikh also directed the Privatization Commission to initiate the process of hiring of Financial Adviser (FA) that the divestment process could be completed as early as possible. An official said the process of privatization remained stalled…

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ISLAMABAD: In an interesting development, the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (Nepra) has returned to the National Transmission & Despatch Company (NTDC) the 27-year Indicative Generation Capacity Expansion Plan (IGCEP 2020-47) to get its approval from the government on the basis of preferred fuel mix and provincial shares. Strangely, the regulator also gave a list of about two dozen renewable plants with a capacity of about 1,600MW having relatively higher tariffs besides a couple of old thermal plants by name for inclusion in the revised plan and yet asked the NTDC to…

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When one suffers from a grand calamity, a possible way of rationalizing subsequent travails is by resorting to a search for reason in the mire of seeming chaos. With the current pandemic though, and the continued mysteries that envelop Covid-19, it is quite challenging to understand what the central takeaway is shaping up to be. Nonetheless, one of the tangential lessons that Covid-19 has brought to the fore is from a centuries-old socio-economic phenomenon known as the tragedy of the commons. For centuries, the Grand Banks fishery off the coast…

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The economic value of the recently discovered natural gas reserve in the Black Sea comes to nearly $65 billion, Turkey’s energy and natural resources minister said Friday. Fatih Dönmez’s remarks came after Turkey earlier announced its biggest ever natural gas discovery, a 320 billion cubic meter (bcm) Black Sea field, which President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said was a part of even bigger reserves and could come onstream as soon as 2023. “Globally, gas prices are oil-indexed. We can say that the economic value of 320 billion cubic meters of natural…

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ISLAMABAD: The Standard & Poor’s (S&P) rating agency on Thursday affirmed Pakistan’s ‘B-’ long-term and ‘B’ short-term sovereign rating while maintaining ‘stable’ long-term outlook. The New York-based rating agency also affirmed ‘B-’ long-term issue rating on Pakistan’s senior unsecured debt and sukuk trust certificates. It said the country’s rating remains constrained by a narrow tax base and domestic and external security risks, which continue to be high. Although the country’s security situation has gradually improved over the recent years, ongoing vulnerabilities weaken the government’s effectiveness and weigh on the business…

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