Privatization of Steel Mills
Since its foundation, the steel mills has been under the management of government-ownership and strictly put under the close coordination of civil bureaucracy. In 2006, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz decided to integrate the steel mills under the intensified programme, called the Privatization Programme. When the news reached to the country, amid demonstration and spontaneous protest began to take place against the government of Shaukat Aziz and sparked lengthy debates in parliament, which members of the opposition walked out of in disgust.
The consortium involving Saudi Arabia-based Al Tuwairqi Group of Companies submitted a winning bid of $362 million for a 75% stake in Pakistan Steel Mills at an open auction held in Islamabad. The consortium including the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works (Russia); the al-Tuwairqi Group of Companies (Saudi Arabia); and the Arif Habib Securities (Pakistan) paid a total Rs. 21.6 billion ($362 million), or Rs.16.8 per share, to take control of Pakistan's largest steel manufacturing plant. Tuwairqi Group of Companies, one of the Leading business concerns in Saudi Arabia, also launched a $300 million steel mills project at Bin Qasim. The group will set up Tuwairqi Steel Mills (TSM), a state-of-the-art steel-making plant in the southern port city of Gawadar, Pakistan.
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Famous quotes containing the words steel and/or mills:
“Through joy and blindness he shall know,
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—Julian Grenfell (1888–1915)
“You haf slafed your life away in de bosses’ mills and your fadhers before you and your kids after you yet. Vat is a man to do with seventeen-fifty a week? His wife must work nights to make another ten, must vork nights and cook and wash in day an’ vatfor? So that the bosses can get rich an’ the stockholders and bondholders. It is too much... ve stood it before because ve vere not organized. Now we have union... We must all stand together for union.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)