NTC safeguarding interests of influential parties?

National Tariff Commission (NTC) is said to be safeguarding the interests of influential parties who have "good" ties in Commerce Ministry, well informed sources told Business Recorder.

Giving details, sources said, on November 27, 2019 NTC completed an investigation into alleged 'dumping' for the product "aluminum cans". The Commission ruled that there was no injury to the industry and hence the investigation was terminated without imposing anti-dumping duties.

Once the decision is made by the Commission on a case before it, a public notice is drafted and sent to be published in a newspaper through an advertising agency. The ad agency edits the public notice, gets it approved by PID, and hands it over for publication in the newspaper for the next day.

This time however, a call was received by the administration wing of the Tariff Commission from the Ad agency which informed NTC that the PID had refused to give clearance or approval of the public notice. On enquiring the reason for this extraordinary incident of refusal, it was revealed that one of the top men had stopped publication of ad from publication, on verbal instructions from the Commerce Ministry. The NTC Administration then asked the ad agency to apprise the NTC in writing, the reasons for stopping the publication of the public notice. The ad agency said in writing "that the Secretary Commerce had stopped that (publication of) Notice till further orders."

The source said, NTC is a semi-judicial body with mandate to investigate cases of alleged 'dumping' of an imported product. If dumping is found after a year-long exhaustive investigation, the Commission imposes anti-dumping duty, in addition to custom duty, on the imported product, which is then collected by the Customs department at the port of entry of that specific good. So while the Ministry of Commerce has administrative control over the National Tariff Commission, the NTC has complete autonomy by law under the NTC Act 2015, to investigate a case and impose (or not impose) anti-dumping duty by directly placing the order on the customs portal. This law was passed especially to make the NTC completely autonomous in investigating and deciding cases of dumping brought before it by the petitioners, which usually is the local industry.

Under this law, the Commission members were given non-terminable, fixed tenure contract jobs, to insulate them from possible pressures from the administrative ministry (Commerce ministry), which was the usual complaint in previous years.

According to sources, the concerned party has close business ties with the company of one of the top men in the Commerce Ministry.