Open auction: After six years, CDA to re-open pump to generate funds

Rent generated from the pump is deposited in a fund for the welfare of poor employees.

ISLAMABAD:

Six years after a petrol pump was shut down, the Capital Development Authority (CDA) will reopen it to generate funds for the welfare of its poor employees. This was decided in a recent board meeting of the authority, officials said.

The CDA will hold rent out the plot of the petrol pump in G-6/4 through an open auction. The board directed the member administration to prepare a summary for the auction after consulting the law wing and present the report in the next meeting.

Back in the seventies, the CDA’s Staff Welfare Committee (SWC) had purchased two sites for petrol pumps in sectors F-6/1 and G-6/4. In 1973, the CDA had rented out land in G-6/4 against Rs1,000 per month to S.M. Ismail for a 30-year-period. In 1975, the other plot was given to Pakistan State Oil at Rs1,500 per month.

The petrol pump at the Embassy Road in G-6/4 was shut down after the tenant moved court against increase of the rent in 2006. The inordinate delay in reopening of the station incurred huge loss to the Staff Welfare Fund (SWF), which is used to support widows, orphans and marriage grants to deserving families.

Due to the closure of the petrol pump, the requests for assistance from deserving employees had been piling up with the SWC, officials said.

The controversy started after the CDA board decided to conduct open auction of both sites through transparent manner in August 2000. When the CDA directed the tenant to vacate the site in December 2002, Ismail obtained a stay order from a court.

In 2006 the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the CDA. The highest bid CDA received was Rs800,000 per month, but the plot was not handed over due to negotiations over the equipment installed by the pump’s former owner.

In the meeting, CDA Secretary General Mazdoor Union Chaudhry Yasin said he had repeatedly requested the CDA high-ups to decide the fate of the land. “We asked the CDA either to run the outlet itself or dispose it of through auction to generate revenue,” he said.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 9^th, 2013.