A hearing into the 11 appeals from the sugar mills of Sindh against the rejection of their constitutional petition by the provincial high court "was left over to a new date" in the Supreme Court here on Thursday as cases listed before ran through the closing hour.
The fixture branch of the nation's highest court of appeals will now notify the fresh date, probably after the Eid holidays. Also one senior counsel for the appellants is on leave of absence from the Supreme Court.
The petitions question an amendment in the Sindh Sugar Factories Control Act of 1950 empowering the government to specify the quality premium rate proportionate to sucrose recovery of each factory in excess of base-level contents.
Previously, this payment was paid by mills on voluntary basis at the end of the sugarcane crushing season.
The mills had challenged the legality of the amendment on the basis that the "concept of demand and recovery of quality premium was relatable to the amount of profits earned by the mills for better quality of sugar".
In some years that the mills sustained losses as reflected in their annual balance sheets, they were compelled to pay quality premium to the government.
The mills said that a similar amendment to the Punjab Sugar Factories Control Act has been deleted by the Lahore High Court under its judgement in 1996. The sugar producers in that province, the appeals pointed out, were not charged that premium by the government any more.
Justice Rana Baghwandas had admitted the appeals for hearing in February last directing that those should be fixed before a bench within six months as the matter involved recovery of public revenue.
The appeals are being piloted by Khalid Anwer under instructions from M. S. Khattak, the Advocate on Record, Fazal-e-Ghani Khan, Shaiq Usmani with his AoR, A. S. K Ghori. Dr Qazi Khalid Ali, Additional Adovcate General Sindh, had appeared for the provincial government.