Lahore Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI), while paying rich tributes to Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani and his cabinet for setting up Rs 1 billion initial compensation fund for the affected businessmen of Karachi carnage, has urged the government to also grant tax exemption to the affectees.
The LCCI President Zafar Iqbal Chaudhry, Senior Vice President Ejaz A. Mumtaz and Vice President Faisal Iqbal Sheikh in a joint statement issued here on Thursday, said that as a large number of affectees of Karachi mayhem were importers, thus the government should exempt them from taxes and duties for some time so that they could be able to re-establish themselves.
They also demanded of the government to provide short and long-term easy loans to the affectees of Karachi. If such timely steps were not taken, unemployment graph would further go up which could create more difficulties in the days to come, they feared and urged the provincial governments and philanthropists to contribute to the fund in the larger interest of the economy of the country.
The LCCI office-bearers observed that the Karachi incident was a well thought-out plan to destabilise Pakistan's economy, and that the government should utilise all available resources to bring to the justice the arsonists who have incurred a loss of billions of rupees on the business community.
They also urged the government to provide alternate business places to the affected businessmen, so that they could be able to make their ends meet by starting their respective businesses afresh. The government, in collaboration with the business community, would have to evolve a foolproof mechanism to avert such incidents of terrorism and arsons, they added.