KARACHI – The Supreme Court has directed the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) to probe into Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) CEO Dr Musharraf Rasool Cyan’s appointment and salary.
“NAB should investigate the PIA CEO’s appointment and the salary and perks offered to him,” Chief Justice of Pakistan Justice Mian Saqib Nisar remarked while hearing a suo motu case at the Supreme Court’s Karachi Registry on Sunday.
The chief justice had taken suo motu notice of difficulties faced by passengers at Skardu airport following a special PIA ‘air safari’ that caused a four-hour delay of a Skardu-Islamabad flight last week.
During the Sunday’s hearing, the CJP expressed anger at the PIA CEO’s action and directed NAB to probe his appointment.
The CJP also asked the PIA CEO to review the airfare on the Islamabad-Skardu route.
A contempt of court notice was also issued to the PIA CEO for using Markhor logo on planes despite a court order barring them.
An airline Finance Department report suggests the national flag-carrier is facing record loss of Rs10 billion during last 10-months after takeover of current top management.
This is the highest ever record loss to the airline. New Management on the plea of curtailing losses had closed down number of important routes being operated more than five decades like; New York, Kuwait etc. despite this, results are totally contrary to the claims.
PIA spokesman Mashhud Tajwar, on the other hand, maintains the losses were only due to devaluation of the rupee.
Due to poor planning of the current management, a total of 650 flights were cancelled due to poor loads during the period of Jan – Jun 2018 which not only annoyed the passengers but also gave a bad name to the airline and its reliability.
The new management instead of bringing improvement in customer related areas, started to remove the national flag of Pakistan from the tail of aircraft and started to place Markhor there which had no relevance towards betterment instead a way of grabbing money for their own pockets. It involved approx Rs 7.4 million for one aircraft.
To meet Haj operation requirement, PIA has cancelled more than 80 scheduled flights to Europe and UK, Kuala Lumpur etc. which will severely damage the airline’s revenues.
Moreover, there is no check on the officials engaged in frequent movement (official trips) from one place to another on the airline’s expenses.
