LONDON, May 8: Promising a relief package for the poor in the forthcoming budget, Finance Minister Ishaq Dar has hinted that progressive taxation will be introduced through the finance bill to make the rich pay their share of dues.

“This will not only serve the principle of equity but also enable the government to mobilise adequate resources for development,” the minister told Pakistani journalists here on Thursday.

Mr Dar, who had arrived here on his way home from Madrid after attending the annual conference of the Asian Development Bank, said his ministry was preparing a non-partisan and non-political database with the help of the National Database and Registration Authority to ensure that the proposed relief reached the right people and was not hijacked by the privileged classes.

He said that according to his calculations, the not-so-rich in Pakistan paid around 10 per cent of their income by way of taxes while the rich paid much less.

“We have, therefore, decided to introduce a progressive tax system to make the rich pay taxes commensurate with their incomes,” he said.

He hinted at withdrawing the exemption being enjoyed by the rich from capital gains tax.

He, however, avoided giving a direct answer when asked if he was contemplating imposing tax on agriculture incomes.

He said he would like to refocus on agro industries for achieving sustainable growth. “The growth achieved in the past eight years was not sustainable because the focus was on producing items which had limited domestic demand and no export bias at all.”

Answering a question, he said he did not believe in the blame game. “What is past is past. I don’t have time to dwell on what had happened or did not happen in the past eight years. I am busy in damage control, in fire fighting, and I am succeeding.”

He said he owned the economic policies in vogue during the past years because it was the Pakistan Muslim League-N governments which had introduced them during their two terms in the 1990s.

He, however, attributed the economic crisis that the coalition government had inherited to what he said was inaction, underestimations, under-budgeting and sheer mismanagement by the army-led PML-Q government.

He said the world oil price hike and steep rise in international prices of food were damaging the economies of developing countries dependent on imports and the rich developed world appeared to be doing nothing to mitigate their miseries.

Mr Dar said flour was now available freely in the country though at a higher price than what one would have wished.

“We are making concrete plans to meet the crises of energy and irrigation water,” he said.

He talked about building the Basha dam for power and irrigation water and taking a closer look at other options like nuclear, solar and windmills energy and said all of the options seemed economically feasible now that the world oil price had gone up to $120 a barrel.

He appeared less enthusiastic about the potential of the country’s coal reserves as according to him they were of low quality.

He blamed the recent depreciation in the value of the rupee to speculation by some ‘unscrupulous forex fixers’. “History is being repeated, they did the same and tried to make a quick buck at the cost of national interests when Pakistan tested its nuclear devices.”

The minister said it was the job of the State Bank to monitor the foreign exchange fluctuation. “The finance ministry will like the SBP, an autonomous institution, to see what can be done.”

He denied the he had met former prime minister Shaukat Aziz during his current stay in London but claimed that Mr Aziz was a friend of his.

“I have not issued a charge-sheet against him, it was his own people, the officials who served under him during his tenure who prepared the reports that I presented to the parliamentary committee. If I had got this report prepared by a different team then I would have been accused of indulging in personal vendetta,” he said.

Mr Dar said the coalition government had made a policy of not banning the export of rice. He said the export price was fixed in consultation with the association of rice exporters, “if they want to revise the price they can always come to us and we will listen to them sympathetically”.

He conceded that Pakistan’s current rice export prices could be on the higher side for the importers in the UK, “but we have not had any complaints about price from any other market, including the Middle East”.

He said he had accompanied former prime minister Nawaz Sharif when he met British Foreign Secretary David Milliband on Wednesday “and we discussed many things, including the economy, social issues, politics and, of course, the judiciary”.

Mr Dar said everyone, including the top leadership of both the PML-N and Pakistan People’s Party, was interested in getting the matter of reinstatement of judges out of the way as quickly as possible so that the government could get on with other equally pressing problems. “Politics does dictate economy crucially, so it is in the interest of the national economy that the reinstatement is completed at the earliest,” he said.