Chief Justice of Pakistan Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry said on Thursday that the evaluation of the Pakistan Steel Mills was not based on the market estimate as the evaluators had not taken the value of its land into account and also relied on unauthenticated financial statements supplied by the PSMC management. He said “The evaluators have assessed the value of the steel mills on the historical principle that the worth of an enterprise always depreciates with time, even though the project has been profitable.”

Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry also referred to a previous decision of the Economic Coordination Committee to float 10% shares of the mills in the stock exchange and said that if it had been done prices of shares would have set a yardstick for the Privatization Commission. He also remarked that it seems as if government was getting rid of steel mills and it was hell bent upon selling it at every cost.
Court also said that correspondence between President General Pervez Musharraf and the PSM chairman, in which the latter is rumored to have opposed the sale, had not been submitted in spite of earlier orders although PSM chairman has denied expressing reservations about the sale of the mills in letters to the president and the prime minister. The PSM counsel said the delay was because the PSM chairman was in Karachi undergoing medical treatment, but assured the bench that the letters could be presented for the judges’ perusal.

Advocate Khalid Anwar counsel for the buyers of the Pakistan Steel Mills submitted before the Supreme Court that any decision against the auction would lead to failure of government’s policy on privatization and scare away foreign investors and that the investors would go to India. However Justice Javed Iqbal observed that the court did not want to destroy the privatization policy, rather it intended to adjudicate a basic question whether the sale of the Pakistan Steel Mills was within the law and whether this investment was in the interest of the country.