ISLAMABAD:Islamabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ICCI) President Ahsan Zafar Bakhtawari said the prevailing complicated business regulations were a barrier to business and investment activities in Pakistan, and stressed that the Board of Investment (BoI) should speed up its process of regulations reforms to promote ease of doing business in the country.
He said this while talking to a BoI delegation that visited ICCI under the headship of Director General (Reforms) Zulfiqar Ali and briefed the business community about the Pakistan Regulatory Modernization Initiative (PRMI) to facilitate the business community, said a press release issued here.
ICCI President said the new environmental laws are creating more problems for the private sector as their compliance is not possible, especially for old businesses, and industries, and stressed that BoI should work in consultation with stakeholders to reform and simplify them.
ICCI Vice President Engr Muhammad Azhar ul Islam Zafar said BoI should take a focal person from every chamber of commerce and association for its PRMI to bring concrete reforms in the business regulations and a timeline should be set up for this project.
BoI’s Director General (Reforms) Zulfiqar Ali, and BoI’s Director (Regulatory Modernization) Adnan Munir gave a detailed presentation on PRMI to the business community.
The said BoI is establishing a Pakistan Business Portal to provide a one-stop shop facility to businesses for licensing, registration, and no-objection certificates through an online system linked to all relevant government departments. This project is likely to be completed by 2027.
They said that BoI has received over 230 proposals for reforms in regulations out of which 115 reforms have been completed while more are being processed.
They said that under PRMI activities, mapping of all business regulations is being done to analyze and eliminate unnecessary regulations and simplify and automate remaining regulations in order to facilitate the business community.
Executive members of ICCI Ameer Hamza, Maqsood Tabish, Muhammad Shabbir, and Muhammad Naeem, former senior vice presidents of ICCI Khalid Chaudhry, and Muhammad Naveed Malik also gave many useful proposals for making regulations more business-friendly.