Minister of State for Revenue Hammad Azhar on Thursday hit back at former finance minister Ishaq Dar's criticism of the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf government, questioning the absconding PML-N leader's right to point fingers at the state of the economy when the financial crisis the country is currently mired in "was a result of his own policies".
"There are [corruption] allegations against him (Dar)," said Azhar during a speech in Islamabad. "He did not surrender himself to the courts as per the law of Pakistan. And he is directly responsible for the economic mess we are in. Yet he still [has the audacity] to come on TV and ask that the 'contract' — because that's how his brain works — of this economy be handed to him."
Dar, who faces trials in Pakistani courts and has been declared a proclaimed absconder for his failure to return, recently did a round of TV interviews, where he slammed the incumbent government's economic policies.
"My question to him is: 'should you be given the 'contract' so you once again increase Pakistan's current account deficit by seven times, double the trade deficit, and triple the losses of state-owned enterprises so the State Bank's reserves start falling again?'," Azhar said.
"He (Dar) says that if the command is given back to him he would take the dollar rate back to Rs120. This is some new principle of economic policy that Ishaq Dar has come up with. He should be given a Nobel Prize for saying that he will increase deficits and strengthen the rupee simultaneously. We are hearing this for the first time. How he can do this, he should let us know.
"Let me tell you how he managed to keep the rupee stable in the last 4-5 years. He borrowed $24 billion from external sources and injected those funds into our currency markets to keep the rupee value high. This way, he kept the deficits growing, and the rupee value remained high but the economy went into the gutter. Today, that very person whose policies brought us into this lurch lectures us on the economy."