ISLAMABAD: As new signature power projects undertaken by the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) government suffer technical problems, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has called a special meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Energy (CCE) on Tuesday to find out why he was led to conduct early inauguration of the 1,200MW Bhikki Power Project in Punjab.
The prime minister is also expected to order release of more funds to existing power houses for sustaining their maximum generation capacity till the end of summer.
In the last CCE meeting, the prime minister had ordered the Ministries of Finance, Water and Power and Petroleum and Natural Resources to reconcile circular debt claims as the power sector had put total bills at Rs401 billion.
The above-mentioned ministries have hobbled around paying Rs50-70bn to the power sector out of the budget in view of ‘previously unseen payments’ made to Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa against net hydel profits.
The Pakistan State Oil had told the government that its operations were threatened by record Rs301bn receivables, mostly by the power sector.
The ministers for power, petroleum and finance continued their deliberations for a third time on Monday after the May 30 meeting of the CCE to fine tune project completion timelines and needed finances for the remaining few months of summer.
Informed sources said it would be for the second time that Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif would be questioned for repeating the mistakes of controversial Nandipur Power Project – rushing processes through a non-technical team to complete projects and luring the prime minister into ribbon-cutting in haste at the cost of public money.
