IRNA� Pakistan Senate Standing Committee on Finance has been informed that in the absence of a buyer, the government planned to lease out the Pakistan Steel Mills (PSM) to a Chinese or Iranian company.


The committee was briefed by Privatization Commission chairman Mohammad Zubair, who said that a proposal was being drafted to lease out the mills.

Talking to media, Zubair later said that the PSM�s total losses had reached over 200 billion US dollars and no one was ready to take responsibility of the crumbling giant. He told the committee that the government wanted to restructure the PSM and restart production.

He told the committee, adding that leasing out the PSM too was �a challenging task�.

The committee was informed that before October 2015, all due diligence and the other formalities were completed and PSM�s privatisation plan was presented to the cabinet after obtaining approval from the Privatisation Commission�s board.

The cabinet decided that PSM should first be offered to the Sindh government and stopped the Privatisation Commission from proceeding with its plans. Zubair said that the Cabinet Committee on Privatization offered the Sindh government to take over the mills, but did not get any response.

Pakistan Steel Mills also known as Pak Steels, is a state-owned producer of the long rolled steel and heavy metal products and entities in the country.

Headquartered in Karachi, Sindh Province of Pakistan, the PSM is the current largest industrial mega-corporation having a production capacity of 1.1 to 5.0 million tonnes of steel and iron foundries.
Built with the contributions of the Soviet Union in the 1970s, it is the largest industrial mega-corporation complex.