Foreign Office Friday defended awarding a task to a private designing company to upgrade its official website and denied any family linkages of Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi with the company.
"The website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is its primary public interface and an open platform. The foreign minister's decision to have the website upgraded is in line with his vision of leading the Foreign Office into the modern & innovative digital age and making the Foreign Office website more user friendly," the Foreign Office said after reports feared that the official data might be compromised while giving the award to a private company.
"The ministry is, therefore, currently working on its improved and updated version. The new layout of the publicly open website is being designed by a reputed web designing company, which was assigned the task on purely professional basis in view of requirement for specialized external design expertise.
The assigned company has neither family link nor personal relationship with the foreign minister," the Foreign Office said, adding it was a specialized digital design agency.
It stated that there was no government/public funding involved in the design cost, adding the foreign minister was personally paying the design cost as a token of his appreciation and commitment to the Foreign Office and its personnel.
In his address to all the officers of the Foreign Ministry on October 02, 2019, the foreign minister announced that the new web design for which he would personally bear the cost would be his 'gift to the ministry and its officers.'
"The information contained in the Foreign Office website is not classified, as it is for the facilitation of the general public, not just in Pakistan but also globally," it stated, adding there was no question of security being compromised in any event given that the website redesign team was simply graphically redesigning the site based on publicly available contents on the existing website.
It stated that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would continue to undertake improvements and up-gradation in all areas, as required. "Malicious attempts to malign such constructive measures are regrettable," it added.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2019