Thousands of tons of cooking oil, ghee being smuggled from Iran

ISLAMABAD: Thousands of tons of cooking oil/ghee are being smuggled from Iran in different cans of 5 to 20 kilograms, causing heavy losses to the country’s formal sector and national exchequer, which runs into billions of rupees.

The formal sector of ghee/cooking oil complained that the government also provided massive exemptions of GST and income tax to the industrial ghee/cooking oil units located in erstwhile FATA/PATA areas through the Finance Act 2021-22.

As such, these units paid close to Rs7,000 per ton customs duty while other units located in the settled areas were paying Rs32,000 ton on raw material. So the units located in settled areas were facing disadvantageous position.

This issue was raised during the National Price Monitoring Committee (NPMC) under the chairmanship of Minister for Finance Shaukat Tarin but so far, no solution could be found so far.

There has been one proposal floated in the NPMC meeting that the input adjustment should be introduced, so that all units could claim refunds but there was no clear-cut decision yet. The industry sources said that sofar 250,000 tons raw material were being imported by the units located in the FATA/PATA areas for meeting consumption requirement of just 5 million population.

https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/924764-thousands-of-tons-of-cooking-oil-ghee-being-smuggled-from-iran