Leader of the Opposition in the National Assembly (NA) Khursheed Ahmed Shah on Friday said that the government had not bothered to take the Parliament into confidence over the $16 billion LNG deal with Qatar.
It was a ‘sad’ act on the part of the government not to keep the parliament in the loop on such an important matter, he said while speaking in the National Assembly.
He said the government returned to parliament whenever it faced difficult times.
“It is painful to hear the ministers calling opposition members’ arguments ‘politics’,” Shah said.
He said that unfortunately, the government was not aware of the power that the parliament bestowed upon its members. Not giving due importance to the parliament was a conspiracy against the system, he added.
He said that the parliamentarians kept clamouring for details of the LNG project to be released for over a year and a half, but nobody from the government bothered to take them into confidence.
Shah said that the agreement signed by the former government for import of CNG was transparent but it was not allowed to materialise by ex-chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry.
He said that he would brief the House on the losses suffered by the Pakistan International Airlines since 2006.
“Decisions (regarding Pakistan) should not be taken by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), but rather the people should be allowed to decide,” he added.
Shah said that it is the fundamental right of the parliamentarian to create policy for the sake of the public.
The opposition leader said that it was unfortunate that the leader of a country adopted a dictatorial behavior. Leaders of the party, which had promised a load shedding-free Pakistan, beat their own people for protesting against power outages, he added.
