Pending Research and Development (R&D) of exporters would be cleared within one month, said Dr Muhammad Saleem Chief Manager State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) Faisalabad. He was addressing a reception hosted in his honour by Pakistan Hosiery Manufacturers & Exporters Association North Zone here on Thursday. He said that 40 percent R&D claims had already been paid while out of remaining 60 percent, SBP has received 10,000 claims.
"Out of these 300 have been referred back to the concerned banks because of some objections," he said and added that 7,000 claims have been paid while remaining 2,700 would be cleared before February 15, 2010. He said that SBP has evolved a transparent procedure for the expeditious payment of R&D and Draw Back (DB) claims based on "First Come-First Serve" basis.
He said that bank staff was paying 300 claims daily and hopefully the entire back log would be cleared positively before February 15. About DB claims, Dr Muhammad Saleem said that SBP has received only 1,500 claims, out of which 300 have been cleared.
He said that there was no paucity of funds and all remaining claims would be cleared within one month. Responding to a question about over all economic conditions, he said that reduction in bank mark-up rate was not visible in near future. However, he stressed upon the industrialist to pressurise government to bring an immediate end to the energy crisis to arrest inflation, which was directly linked with mark-up rate.
Earlier, in his address of welcome Mian Naeem Ahmed Vice Chairman PHMA North Zone said that 1,500 members of this association earn 1.8 billion US dollars foreign exchange every year in addition to providing jobs to more than 500 thousands workers. Rana Mushtaq Khan Central Chairman PHMA, Muhammad Amjad Khawaja, Qamar Aftab, Mian Naeem-ul-Haq, Mian Khalid Pervaiz, Chaudhry Iqbal Akbar and Shahid Ahmed Sheikh also raised some questions during the question-Answer sitting.