Tear sheets, DROs are legal requirement: Orient CEO

Newspaper clipping and DRO was legally required to get payment for a govt ad, stated CEO of Orient.

Advertising agencies admit that providing an original tear sheet (newspaper clipping) and departmental release order (DRO) was legally required to get payment for a government advertisement, stated Mehmood Hashmi, CEO of Orient Advertising, one of the largest advertising companies in Pakistan, in an interview with the Daily Express.

Orient is one of the 24 companies asking the government to relax its requirements for documentation on a one-time basis so that they can be paid for government advertisements going back over a decade.

Hashmi suggested a compromise between what he admitted was a legal requirement and the practical difficulties faced by advertising companies and media houses.

“Media houses and advertising agencies should volunteer to pay back five to ten times the amount the government paid them, if their claims are proven false over the next five years,” he said.

At the same time, Hashmi said that the haste with which the whole matter is being conducted opens up the very real possibility that newspapers with fake claims will get paid whereas newspapers with genuine claims may yet remain unpaid.

Hashmi said that, in a meeting of the All Pakistan Newspapers Society at the Presidency in Islamabad, the APNS president said that the government has issued DROs for advertisements in 216 newspapers, yet the APNS recognises only five of them.

The APNS has been trying to get the government to expedite unpaid advertising bills that various government departments have neglected to pay. Between 2000 and 2008, the APNS claims that as much as Rs357 million was left unpaid.

Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani has been trying to address the problem but has come under criticism for having allegedly authorised a one-time suspension of the rules for newspapers making claims for unpaid bills, an act for which the Federal Investigation Agency has prosecuted officials in the past.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 20^th, 2011.