New PSO oil refinery worth $700m on cards

Senators express displeasure on high salaries, disregard for provincial quota.

ISLAMABAD:

Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa will soon have its first modern crude oil refinery, in a project worth 700-800 million dollars, said Managing Director (MD) Pakistan State Oil (PSO) Naeem Yahya Mir on Thursday.

Briefing reporters at Parliament House after a meeting of the Senate special committee, Mir said that PSO management will visit the province to acquire land for the refinery. The project, which is expected to be completed in four years, would help refine 40,000 barrels of crude oil daily.

Highlighting initiatives by the management, the MD said the state-owned oil enterprise was transforming from an oil marketing company to a distribution company. He added that the new management of PSO has initiated various reforms aimed at bringing improvements in the refinery sector of the country, which would reduce the price of oil.

Mir said that cost saving initiatives being undertaken at PSO included eliminating the addition of detergent additives in Mogas and Diesel which would save approximately Rs635 million per year and stoppage of war premium insurance payments on petroleum product imports which would save another Rs450 million per year. Furthermore, the MD stated that PSO had initiated a plan to eliminate the role of middleman along with cost rationalisation.

Partnerships, added Mir, were going to be the future of PSO growth as the company planned to establish a regional joint venture aviation company in the Middle East and was exploring options of expanding into the coal business in partnership with other companies.

Earlier, the special committee, chaired by Senator Zahid Khan took PSO management to task for failing to provide a complete report on appointments in the state owned company during the past four years.

The committee expressed displeasure over the inequality in salary packages of employees. It was also pointed out by the committee that some PSO employees in senior management draw salaries in millions of rupees per months while lower staff are paid as little as a few thousand rupees.

While briefing the committee, MD PSO said that over the past four years, PSO hired 307 persons at different levels. He said all of them have now been regularised by the company, as per the directions of the government.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 28^th, 2012.