Yousafzai rejects claim of Rs4bn gold output in KP in a day
The PTI leader said Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's entire annual tax and non-tax revenue is Rs150 billion and challenged Ikhtiar Wali to take the mining contract.
Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf leader Shaukat Yousafzai has rejected as absurd an allegation that gold worth Rs4 billion is extracted in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in a single day, saying the province's tax and non-tax revenue for an entire year is Rs150 billion.
The allegation was attributed to Ikhtiar Wali. Express News carried Yousafzai's response and did not say where or when he spoke.
Yousafzai said the old advice to weigh one's words before speaking applies to the claim. If Rs4 billion of gold were really being taken out of the province every day, the mining contract should be handed to Ikhtiar Wali, he said.
Wali should then pay Rs500 billion to the province and Rs500 billion to the federation and keep the rest for himself, Yousafzai said. If the province's annual income were Rs1,500 billion, he added, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa would have become Paris.
He asked the government to stop what he called a crude media trial of PTI, and said a "lie brigade" had been set to work making new narratives against the party. The allegations had moved from non-cooperation in the war against terrorism to corruption and now to illegal mines, he said, and he called the sequence regrettable.
Yousafzai said those making the allegations should bring their evidence on corruption and illegal mines into the open if they have any. He described the charge that 80 percent of the gold is smuggled into Afghanistan as a very big allegation.
He said adding to a province's resources from its natural minerals is not illegal, and that investors coming to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa for scientific mining would be a good thing.
Yousafzai said Rs4 billion a day, if true, would make the mining contract the most valuable in the country, and repeated that it should go to the man making the claim. He did not name anyone he was accusing of running the "lie brigade".
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