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Posted by admin in Domestic Policy, Economics, Nawaz Sharif & Kashmiri Biradari, NAWAZ SHARIF DICTATOR, NAWAZ SHARIF FAMILY TURPITUDE, NAWAZ SHARIF LOAN SCAM, Nawaz Sharif Massive Corruption on May 11th, 2014
May 03, 2014
The senior deputy governor, who had acquired some expertise in banking supervision by serving for a considerable time in staff positions at the SBP, has been sidelined with the result that vital monetary policy and bank regulatory decisions will basically be made by the two raw hands at the helm of SBP affairs. These two have to rub shoulders with competent and experienced counterparts from other countries, both bilaterally and in multilateral settings, and are bound to cut a sorry figure.
These appointments, based on political expediency and personal loyalty rather than professional competence and personal integrity, can enable the rulers to exploit national financial resources without SBP hindrance and are hurtful for institution-building and macroeconomic management. Imagine what would happen to the defence of the country if a poorly trained head of a private security company is appointed as the chief of army staff. One side effect of undeserving appointments at the top of the SBP is that these vital positions will gradually degenerate to become subservient to the illegal dictates of the appointing authorities.
The SBP governor is the regulator of the banking system and custodian of monetary stability and is important for prudent economic management of the country and a sound financial system. He/she is supposed to be non-political, professionally qualified and personally strong to face and overcome challenges.
With no professional standing or stature or relevant work experience, a governor or a deputy governor appointed on political considerations will be unable to measure up to his/her difficult task. The situation becomes all the more grim with an accountant finance minister and a businessman prime minister using their political muscles to keep the central bank and the banking system under their control.
With the present weak and vulnerable SBP management, the political leaders would have a free hand in starting yellow cab schemes, doling out subsidised loans to their fellow businessmen in the name of investment promotion, giving collateral-free loans to young people in the name of employment generation, writing off large loans to their cronies, printing notes to finance their low-priority prestige projects and setting the level of interest rates to subsidise their own businesses or those of the business community at large rather than to promote macroeconomic stability.
These appointments are also a slap on the face of the IMF and expose its hollow statements about strengthening of the operational autonomy of the SBP. It has been stressing in its reports and press statements the importance of an operationally autonomous and professionally competent SBP for monetary and price stability and advocating further legislative reforms to enhance it.
Their conditionality for enactment of more laws may be met on paper but there will be no qualified and courageous management team at the SBP to enforce them. It will change nothing in reality but the IMF staff will be able to show to their executive board that the government has enacted new laws to enhance SBP autonomy and score some career-enhancing brownie points within their own organisation.
It is also interesting and unusual that the new governor issued a press release a day after the assumption of office with some unfounded observations about the existing ‘monetary stability’ and prospects “to make further strides in improving economic welfare, while ensuring macroeconomic and financial stability”.
The press release claimed that the “State Bank had been playing an active role in improving the monetary and financial conditions together with the betterment of overall economy at large”. In making this statement, the honourable governor must be talking about a country other than Pakistan.
In the last decade, the economy of Pakistan has suffered from stagflation which combined in it a low growth and high inflation. One of the main reasons for this state of affairs was the inability of the SBP to stop the government from forcing it to print excessive currency notes and pre-empting the bulk of commercial bank credit to finance fiscal operations. The money supply was allowed to grow at a rate five times faster than the rate of growth of the economy creating intense inflationary pressures. For the first time in the history of the country, the annual rate of inflation has been running in double digits for almost a decade.
This happened because of excessive government bank borrowing crowding out the private sector, which is the real engine of economic growth, and the government forcing the SBP to keep real interest rates in negative territory. It is very unfortunate that a period of rapid money creation due to excessive government bank borrowing and negative real interest rates has been characterised by the SBP governor as one of “monetary stability”.
Going forward, the governor is not committing to working off inflationary pressures by perusing a prudent monetary policy as required by the SBP Act, but rather to hold “workshops for media persons to carve out a stronger interface between SBP and people of Pakistan”.
The people of Pakistan have been burdened with a high rate of inflation, rising unemployment, grinding poverty and mounting internal and external debt and are not interested in carving out a stronger interface with the central bank, which has contributed to their problems by its incompetence and lack of effectiveness.
What is really needed is not a stronger interface between the SBP and the people of Pakistan but rather between the governor and central banking functions prescribed in economics textbooks. Moreover, before making more monetary data available to the people, he should devote some time in studying the available data and understand what is going on in the monetary sector.
The central banks of the world have moved on to conducting monetary policies based on inflation targeting and regulating the banking system through stress testing of individual banks. The SBP is stuck in the ceremony of announcing the policy rate and issuing outdated prudential regulations. It is about time the SBP catches up with other central banks with whom the governor will have to interact, both bilaterally and in international settings.
The governor has also reiterated the “SBP’s commitment in working to achieve its national goals of maintaining monetary and financial stability”. He may or may not understand what monetary and financial stability means in economics or in the real world but let us remind him what he will have to do to honour this commitment.
He needs to become conversant with the legal requirements stipulated in the SBP Act for the formulation and conduct of a monetary policy to regulate “the expansion of liquidity” in the economy so as to ensure a sharp reduction in inflationary pressures. As required by the SBP Act, it must formulate monetary policy without excessive accommodation of government by using its authority to “determine and enforce” prudent limits on government borrowing from the SBP.
The governor will need to safeguard the jurisdiction of the central bank and conduct monetary policy with the main aim of controlling growth in money supply to reduce inflation and channel commercial bank credit to the private sector to promote economic growth.
He also has to do a better job of regulating the banking system by effectively enforcing prudential regulations to direct the commercial banks to undertake more intensely their financial intermediation function through improvement in efficiency and enhancement of competition and narrowing of the interest spread. It is his job to ensure that commercial banks serve the interest of the country rather than earn fat profits by locking their deposits in the purchase of government securities.
Most importantly, the governor should not blindly accept government instructions to print more currency notes but be prepared to ‘determine and enforce’ a limit on its borrowing from the SBP, if necessary.
The writer is a former governor of the State Bank of Pakistan.
Email: [email protected]
If economist Jim O’Neill’s projections are correct, Pakistan’s economy would grow 15 times in the next 35 years or so.
The BBC in its recently published article, termed it as the envy of many developed countries but also two of the BRIC countries, China and Russia. So, if Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey get their act together, some of them could match Chinese-style double-digit rates between 2003 and 2008.
BUT STILL NAWAZ SHARIF FAILS
MORE ECONOMIC GRAPHS
Posted by ali rehan munir in Economics, SHARIF BROTHERS TAX CHEATS on June 25th, 2013
Majority of the Pakistanis were dejected after hearing the budget speech on the evening of June 12, 2013. Not because there was no relief for the poor as this was not expected by anybody from a government just installed and dealing with a ravaged economy but the real cause of disappointment was demonstration of lack of will to tax the rich – on the contrary increasing the brunt of indirect taxes manifold on the poor, and inflicting pain on the salaried class.
The government failed to take any credible measures for revival of the ailing economy. The major taxation proposals show that the poor will have to face more miseries – regressive taxes are on increase. On the contrary, the rich and the mighty have again managed to escape personal taxation on their colossal income and wealth. The gigantic bureaucratic apparatus – epitome of bad governance – under pressure is given 10 percent pay raise but not a single step has been taken to curtail their monstrous wasteful expenditure and monetize all their perquisites and benefits received in kind. The analyses done by independent economists and observers reveal that the government of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N),
in its maiden budget has failed to meet the economic challenges of the day confirming the oft-repeated apprehensions that no homework was done nor was there any policy paper available – PML-N like its predecessor PPPP acted on the advice of bureaucracy. There is nothing innovative in the budget. It is in fact, the 66th bureaucrat-controlled budget and what do we get? Same old rhetoric about economic revival!
What should have budget 2013-14 been like? This question was never discussed by the elected government during its election campaign or within the party. Pakistani political parties have yet not learnt that they need to have select committees working on various matters so that once in power they can implement their well-thought-for, well-debated and well-researched policies. 
Since there was no such preparation on the part of PML-N, the annual budget, as usual was hastily made in the same old mould – bureaucratic-controlled and pro-rich. Nobody realised while preparing this important document that at this juncture of history, Pakistan needs class stability to avoid chaos, civic strife, lawlessness and religious obscurantism. The burgeoning debt servicing, increased military budget, high inflation, unjust tax system, wasteful expenses, industrial slowdown, recession, and inefficiency and bad governance pose serious challenges to our economic survival. But, in the budget no serious effort is made to meet these challenges – the budget-makers were more interested to balance their books through foreign and domestic resources (some purely imaginary or unrealistic). Somebody asked, what else could one expect from an accountant? But the question is where the stalwarts were? People like Sartaj Aziz and Hafeez A Pasha, who are known economists.
Dr Hafeez Pasha in his comments on the taxation proposals of the budget, published in an English newspaper, claimed that “virtually all sectors have been tapped.” We have serious reservations about this claim. The budget has failed to provide steps to bridge the tax gap of over Rs 6,000 billion. Tax potential of Pakistan is not less than Rs 8 trillion. The simple calculation is: suppose we have 10 million individuals having annual taxable income of Rs 1.5 million (a very conservative estimate), total income tax collection from them comes to Rs 3,750 billion. If we add income tax from corporate bodies, other non-individual taxpayers and individuals having income between Rs 400,000 to Rs 1,000,000, the gross figure comes to Rs 5,000 billion. FBR collected only Rs 716 billion as income tax in 2011-12. Similarly, due to rampant corruption in sales tax, federal excise and customs duties, the total collection is not more than 30 percent of actual potential. In fiscal year 2011-12, FBR collected Rs 804.8 billion under the head sales tax, Rs 122.5 billion under federal excise duty and only Rs 216.9 billion under customs duties. The total indirect collection of just Rs 1,148.2 billion was pathetically low. It should have been at least Rs 3,500 billion. Budget needed to outline measures to bridge the prevalent tax gap without imposing any new taxes or raising the tax rates. If it is still done, we can change the entire fiscal scene of Pakistan – instead of budget deficit we would have surplus funds.
In view of above, there was no need of increasing sales tax rate or federal excise or enhancing rates for salaried persons. The need was to shift FBR’s management to an autonomous board comprising professionals and establishing an independent tax appellate system so that tax obligations are judiciously imposed and collected rather than through arbitrariness and highhandedness and that too only from those who file returns. FBR has failed to force millions to file income tax and sales tax returns but keep on creating huge demands against the existing filers. This is the reason why people do not file returns as they say once you do so then you are under constant threat of being blackmailed by officials and in case you do not oblige, you are subjected to arbitrary orders. One may ask what FBR has done about the following pointed out by Nadra:
— There are 1.611 million people who frequently embark on international tours but do not pay a single penny as income tax.
— About 584,730 Pakistanis have multiple accounts in domestic and multinational banks, but do not possess NTNs.
— Over 56,000 people live in posh areas and more than 20,000 people own luxury cars, still pay no income tax.
— There are 66,736 individual consumers who pay large utility bills, but no income tax.
— More than 13,000 people have licenses of both prohibited and non-prohibited weapons, but they do not possess an NTN.
— There are 25,130 people who are engaged in lucrative professions like medicine, engineering, law and chartered accountancy, but they do not pay a single penny as income tax.
— Nearly three million people possess a National Tax Number (NTN), but only 1.4 million of them filed income tax returns last year.
Had FBR performed its functions, we could have easily collected Rs 8,000 billion without changing anything. Even economist like Dr Hafeez A Pasha, who has been Chairman, Advisory Council of FBR, keeps on saying that our tax base is narrow. He, like many others thinks that only those who file returns are taxpayers. In fact, the total number of taxpayers is over 50 million – mobile users who pay 10 percent adjustable income and 19.5 percent sales tax. It is true that only 1.2 million out of these taxpayers filed income tax returns in 2012. Figure of 1.2 million is only that of return filers and not taxpayers. In the income tax realm, every account holder of a bank, who receives any amount of interest, is subjected to 10 percent withholding tax and is thus a taxpayer. It is worthwhile to note that in the case of individuals and association of persons, tax deducted at source is full and final discharge under section 169 of the Income Tax Ordinance, 2001. They are merely required to file a simple statement under section 115(4) of the Income Tax Ordinance, 2001 ie if they do not have any other source of income. Had FBR allotted all of them NTNs, it could proudly be said that there are over 50 million registered taxpayers in Pakistan.
The real issue is non-taxation of super-rich who owe billions to the national exchequer. What has prevented the FBR to take action against them? After receiving data from Nadra, why FBR instead of taking action against them was proposing an amnesty scheme? Why no action is taken against them till today?
The revenue target fixed for FBR at Rs 2,475 billion is pathetically low when the actual potential is not less than Rs 8,000 billion. The issue is that of enforcement of tax laws compelling all the people having income of Rs 400,000 or more to file tax returns. Instead of doing this, Ishaq Dar has opted to propose more taxes on the lower income sections of the population. Increase of one percent in sales tax rate and further two percent for supplies made to non-registered persons, five percent on top of the standard 16 percent on non-registered commercial and industrial consumers of electricity and gas, increase in federal excise duty on beverages and cigarettes, expansion in items, which are chargeable to sales tax on retail prices, are all regressive tax measures. When FBR cannot enforce the existing laws, what is the guarantee that these new ones would be implemented? Obviously more corruption would follow as more people would want to evade taxes and tax officials would benefit more as they get their due share. The same would be the fate of withholding taxes on hotels, clubs, marriage halls, restaurants, cable operators, margin and trade financing, motor vehicles (in lump sum), foreign-produced films and TV serials. Who will enforce these laws? In the name of audit of withholding agents more money will go into the pockets of these unscrupulous officials.
The earmarked income support levy on moveable assets is again a wrong measure. It would be like surcharge in the 1980s and the export development surcharge/cess more recently, all proving disastrous. The assignment of taxes at the local bodied level is the answer but the governments are not ready to meet their Constitutional obligation clearly envisaged in Article 140A which says: “Each Province shall, by law, establish a local government system and devolve political, administrative and financial responsibility and authority to the elected representatives of the local governments.”
Shahid Hafeez Kardar, a leading economist and former finance minister of Punjab, very rightly observed: “In our case tax administration weaknesses with regard to enforcement arise because of an ineffective legal system and the lack of effective accountability of government employees. Greater publicity should be given to cases of tax evasion (only those upheld by courts or conceded to by taxpayers) in the hope that public shame would serve as one of the deterrents to tax evasion. Good governance in a structure of transparent taxation cannot be achieved with the same ease as computerisation of the taxation system through purchase of equipment and supporting software. These essentials will continue to elude us as long as the governing political system nurtured and supported by the elite is financed by black money through institutionalised instruments and mechanisms for evading taxes. How does one overhaul such a system through the transformation of the political structure is a million-dollar question that defies easy answers as to the need for tax reform built around transparent and simpler systems of taxation. However, the reality is that there are no quick fixes. Exercises to simplify tax laws and to ensure effective enforcement can take several years, as the experience of even developed countries shows – for instance, it took Canada 10 years to implement the proposals of the Carter Commission.”
Our tragedy is that on the one hand we have too many taxes in the country (federal and provincial) and on the other the benefit of revenue collection is not reaching the down-trodden. The few rich are the real beneficiaries of every luxury that is available. Fiscal gap is increasing every year bringing more miseries for the common man of Pakistan. We have utterly failed to reform our tax system, a process initiated as early as 1990s.
In fact, the real malady has not been properly studied by anybody. There is something fundamentally wrong with Pakistan’s constitutional structure of distribution of taxing powers between the federation and the federating units. In all major federations – the US, Canada and India – the federating units have the exclusive right to levy tax on transactions of goods and services within their geographical boundaries. In Pakistan, the Constituent Assembly took away this right of levying sales tax on goods from provinces in 1948 – none of the provinces ever raised a voice for its reversal. In the 7th Award as well, all the four provinces conceded that forthcoming Value Added Tax (VAT) on goods should be levied by the Centre.
The Centre has always usurped the right of the provinces to levy tax on goods and services within their territorial jurisdiction. Assignment of taxes is a vital constitutional and political issue and it is high time that the newly-elected parliament pay due attention to solution for judicious distribution of taxation rights between the Centre and the federating units. The imbalances and unjust monopoly of taxes with Islamabad is a perpetual source of disharmony between the Centre and the provinces. It is not distribution under National Finance Commission Award that matters but the question is why provinces are deprived of their right to levy taxes on goods within their territories. Why is the Centre imposing sales tax and federal excise on goods?
Federal highhandedness in tax matters has destroyed the financial and economic rights of provinces. The provinces should have the exclusive right to levy taxes on goods and services within their respective physical boundaries, but the Federal Government blatantly encroached upon their undisputed right by levying taxes on goods and services under the garb of presumptive taxes in Income Tax. Such taxes cannot be termed as taxes on income (which the federal government is empowered to levy under item 47 of the Federal List) but tax on goods and services. It is a great tragedy that this argument was not presented in the Supreme Court when the constitutionality of such provisions was challenged in 1991 and the debate merely revolved around academic discussions over the concept of income. If the federal government can treat tax on goods and services as tax on income, as held by the apex court per incuriam (a mistaken judgement) in Elahi Cotton case PLD 1997 SC 582, then what will be sanctity of division of fiscal powers provided in the Constitution of Pakistan between the Federation and the provinces.
Despite federal highhandedness in levying unjust taxes and denying the provinces their legitimate shares, the Centre has miserably failed to reduce the burgeoning fiscal deficit. Had provinces been allowed to generate their own resources, the present chaotic situation could have been averted. The federal government has the audacity to claim that provinces lack infrastructure to efficiently collect taxes – an attitude that is reflective of colonial legacy and proved wrong by the Sindh Revenue Board and Punjab Revenue Authority by collecting sales tax on services.
On the one hand the provinces have been denied autonomy and on the other, money that belonged to them – collected as federal taxes – is given to them as act of benevolence – it is adding insult to injury. This is a considered policy of control for maintaining hegemony over federating units. The provinces should have exclusive right to levy taxes on goods and services generated within their boundaries. But they should surrender right to taxation on agricultural income tax to the federation. The National Parliament and provincial parliaments should forge a consensus on this issue.
The federal government has miserably failed to tap the real revenue potential, which is not less than Rs 8 trillion. The failure of FBR on this account adversely and directly affects the provinces as they are wholly dependent on what the Centre collects and transfers to them from the divisible pool. Pakistan is thus, caught in a dilemma: Centre is unwilling to grant the provinces their legitimate taxation rights as well as collects too little to meet their overall financial demands. The size of cake – divisible pool – is so small that nothing substantial can be done for the welfare of the poor masses, no matter in which part of the country they live. The real issue of generating sufficient resources for the less privileged is still unattended.
HUZAIMA BUKHARI AND DR IKRAMUL HAQ
(The writers, tax lawyers and partners in HUZAIMA & IKRAM (Taxand Pakistan), are Adjunct Professors at Lahore University of Management Sciences)
Courtesy: Ali Syed
Posted by admin in Corruption, Domestic Policy, Economics, Education, Foreign Policy on December 13th, 2012
Dec 8th 2012 | ISLAMABAD | from the print edition
PAKISTAN’S national poet, Muhammad Iqbal, believed the subcontinent’s Muslims needed to unite if they were to prosper. Without a strong sense of nationhood, he wrote, “mountains become straw and are blown away in the wind”.
Poetry and taxes do not often mix. But those melancholy lines grace an analysis of Pakistan’s fiscal plight by Ehtisham Ahmad of the London School of Economics. The country’s tax revenues have collapsed. Its debt is almost certainly unsustainable without outside help. And yet Pakistan does not pull together. “Textile lobbies, the urban gentry, traders and agriculturists, all point to the other and say: Tax that group first, but do not tax me,” Mr Ahmad writes.
The tax authorities can identify a mere 768,000 individuals who paid income tax last year. Even fewer—just 270,000—have paid something in each of the past three years. That is one reason why Pakistan’s tax revenues amounted to only 9.1% of GDP in the latest fiscal year, one of the lowest ratios in the world (see chart). These are exceedingly narrow shoulders on which to rest a nuclear-armed state of 180m people. The culture of cheating starts at the top. Most members of parliament, many of them conspicuously affluent, do not file tax returns.
In the months before an election, due by May, the government of President Asif Zardari of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) is proposing a controversial remedy: an amnesty for evaders. They will be invited to wipe the slate clean with a one-off payment of only 40,000 rupees ($400). The government says it is a quick way to resuscitate the public finances and expand the tax net. Its critics see the amnesty as a boon for politically connected crooks.
The scheme is the brainchild of Pakistan’s tax chief, Ali Hakeem, head of the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) since July. His computer boffins have spent the past few months trawling data—not to find out how much people earn, but rather to unearth their spending patterns and lifestyles. The FBR has come up with 1,700 variables that predict a person’s tax liability. Some clues are obvious, such as foreign travel, owning a house in a posh neighbourhood and big-ticket purchases such as cars. Others are ingenious. It turns out that having a weapons licence is an excellent indicator of wealth. The FBR’s analysis also shows that married men are richer than single men. Men with two wives are richer still. However, men with four wives (the maximum allowed to Muslims in Pakistan) are often poorer than those who have only one.
Many people escape paying taxes by simply bribing the tax inspectors who call on them, Mr Hakeem admits. “We want the computers to be the enforcers,” he says. The exercise has identified around 3m people who should be paying tax. Under the plan, these people will be served notice and given 75 days to comply or they will face punishment.
But if the FBR can identify the dodgers, why can it not pursue them for the full amount they owe? The tax board says it wants to use its new data fast, before a possible change of government jeopardises the scheme. There is no time to calculate the evaders’ full liabilities.
Mr Hakeem believes the system is so rotten that, in effect, it offers an amnesty to almost everyone anyway. But cynics worry that the oily businessmen and back-room fixers who have prospered over the past four years of PPP government will use the scheme to legitimise their ill-gotten gains. It is “a way of laundering your money”, says Hafeez Pasha, a former finance minister.
Amnesties, which have failed in Pakistan in the past, create perverse incentives. They alienate taxpayers otherwise disposed to being honest, who may decide to stop filing and wait for the next such offer. At best, the amnesty will bring in another 0.5% of GDP in revenue, Mr Ahmad suggests. At worst, revenues may fall.
Both Mr Pasha and Mr Ahmad argue that more fundamental reform is required. Many people fail to pay taxes because they are not legally obliged to do so. Agriculture is exempt from federal income tax, largely because parliamentarians are either large landowners or dependent on rural votes.
Mr Hakeem’s board has the power to exempt products through regulatory orders without the approval of parliament. One such order, dated April Fool’s Day, 2011, made a mockery of the country’s sales tax, imposing a 0% rate on 184 items, including carpets, buttons and the willow wood from which cricket bats are made—as well as “any other goods as may be specified”. Mr Hakeem’s number-crunching may help plug some leaks in Pakistan’s tax bucket. But his board has already poked hundreds of legal holes in it.
Pakistan promised to abolish loopholes in 2008 as one of the conditions for a generous IMF loan of $11.5 billion. Yet it failed to do so. It also promised to remove the tax board’s discretionary power to create loopholes. But punching holes in the tax code is a handy way to “win friends and influence people”, Mr Ahmad says.
A low tax take breeds problems. People who might otherwise pay their taxes wonder what services they will get in return. Federal revenues are swallowed up by debt servicing, defence spending and power subsidies, with no room for much-needed spending on health, education or welfare. A constitutional amendment passed in 2010 gave the provinces clearer responsibility for such programmes. But the provinces lack a reliable tax base of their own. In the latest fiscal year, Pakistan spared only 0.3% of GDP for health.
Despite such miserliness, Pakistan’s budget deficit still exceeded 8% of GDP last year. The government has bridged the gap by borrowing from the central bank and the banking system (which itself borrows heavily from the central bank). This has crowded out private borrowing and ushered in inflation, projected by the IMF to return to double-digit rates by the middle of next year.
Fundamental tax reform will always upset one powerful constituency or another, whether it be the landed gentry, farmers, traders or industrialists. Without reform Pakistan courts economic disaster, a financial crisis that might blow the precarious economy away like straw. That would upset everybody. But Pakistan’s ruling elites assume that such a crisis will always be averted with help from international donors. And, says Mr Ahmad, “they are probably right.”
Posted by admin in Domestic Policy, Economics, Global Issues, Pakistan's Hall of Shame on December 2nd, 2012
Cristal Montanez Baylor is the Executive Director of Hashoo Foundation USA. She leads initiatives to promote Hashoo Foundation’s Women’s Empowerment through Honey Bee Farming Project – “Plan Bee”- in the US. The project empowers women in the remote Northern Areas of Pakistan by expanding employment opportunities and generating a stable source of income through the sale of high-quality honey. The project is the winner of the prestigious World Challenge 08 Award competition sponsored by BBC and Newsweek in association with Shell, and it is a featured commitment on the Clinton Global Initiative website. Cristal believes that expanding income generating programs will strengthen the communities and help prevent the influence of extremism in Pakistan.
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