ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court (SC) on Wednesday summoned details of vacancies at the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), after the national flag carrier sought the top court’s permission to fill its vacant posts and extend existing contracts.
The court heard a case pertaining to PIA’s privatisation and financial losses after the airline submitted an application to bring the judges’ attention towards, what it said was, a critical shortage of skill-set at the company.
On March 31, the Supreme Court had completely banned new recruitment in PIA.
In his remarks, Justice Azmat Saeed said PIA already had many employees, and questioned why the airline needed to recruit more people.
The judge ordered the airline to submit a list of vacant posts to the court. “If PIA doesn’t fix itself, then the anger has to be vented out on someone,” he remarked.
The Supreme Court also summoned PIA’s reply on an audit report submitted by the auditor general of Pakistan.
Expressing their annoyance at the state of affairs plaguing the airline, the judges said the audit report was a “postmortem” of PIA’s performance.
The Board of the Privatisation Commission last month proposed to defer the sale of PIA and Pakistan Steel Mills, after conducting a review of the privatisation programme and finalising entities to be included in the list of active privatisation programme.
The board instead decided to approach relevant investigative bodies in order to recover the outstanding Rs3.9 billion dues from the buyers of state-owned entities privatised in the 1990s.
