Islamabad \u2014 The Senate Standing Committee on Finance and Revenue, chaired by Senator Saleem Mandviwalla, held its opening session to deliberate on the Finance Bill 2025 and the Annual Budget Statement presented under Article 73 of the Constitution. Federal Minister for Finance and Revenue Muhammad Aurangzeb attended the session and outlined key aspects of the government\u2019s fiscal approach, emphasizing that no new taxes were introduced, but Rs. 312 billion in new measures were initiated through compliance and enforcement, in line with IMF commitments. He announced that the World Bank Executive Board had just approved financing for the Reko Diq project, with the International Finance Corporation contributing $700 million. Highlighting economic progress, the minister shared that exports have risen by 7.8% this fiscal year, reaching $30 billion in eleven months. He dismissed rumors about restrictions on Letters of Credit (LCs) as misinformation and acknowledged that privatization targets had not been met, though PIA was back in the pipeline. On agricultural income tax, Aurangzeb said provinces would begin collection from 1 July 2025. Senators Farooq H. Naek and Anusha Rahman proposed raising the retirement age of bureaucrats to reduce pension burdens, which the minister agreed to consider after the budget is finalized. The committee also discussed measures to eliminate non-filers and document the cash economy. The session concluded with a shared understanding that the budget reflects strategic resilience against external and internal economic pressures. The committee will reconvene for its second session on Saturday, 14 June 2025, at 2:00 PM.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Islamabad \u2014 The Senate Standing Committee on Finance and Revenue, chaired by Senator Saleem Mandviwalla, held its opening session to deliberate on the Finance Bill 2025 and the Annual Budget Statement presented under Article 73 of the Constitution. Federal Minister for Finance and Revenue Muhammad Aurangzeb attended the session and outlined key aspects of the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":2871,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[94],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pakistan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peakpoint.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peakpoint.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peakpoint.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peakpoint.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peakpoint.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2870"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.peakpoint.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2872,"href":"https:\/\/www.peakpoint.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2870\/revisions\/2872"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peakpoint.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peakpoint.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peakpoint.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peakpoint.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}