Cotton factories ‘owed’ $30 million by Pakistan: Kandahar Chamber

Owners of cotton processing factories in Kandahar said this week that Pakistan is holding back about $30 million dollars owed to the sector in a bid to put them out of business.

According to Sayed Sarwar Amani, the head of the Kandahar Chamber of Commerce and Industries, due to restrictions on banking, Pakistan has failed to pay about $30 million owed to factories in the province.

“Our banking system is defective, we have problems, the banking remittances are closed, especially Pakistan is using this unfairly, it means that a lot of money from our cotton sector which is about $30 million is blocked in Pakistan.

“I can say that they are not paying us the money of 24 factories by referral nor through the banking system nor by TT (telegraphic transfer),” Amani said.

There are 24 cotton processing factories in Kandahar which processed approximately 400,000 tons of cotton last year.

However, due to the challenges faced by the sector, this has dropped to only about 200,000 tons this year.

Chamber officials said Pakistan is trying to create problems for the owners of these factories in order to put them out of business.

Factory owners meanwhile said that a shortage of electricity to their industrial parks was also a major challenge.

Yar Mohammad Rahmani, the owner of one cotton factory, said: “Our main problem is electricity, before the coming of the Islamic Emirate we used to have generators here with 10-Megawatt electricity but we don’t have that now; now we are using solar power and (electricity generated from) Kajaki Dam,” he said adding that factories in the industrial plant got electricity only on alternate days.

Power “is provided one day to the north side of the park and one day to the south, I can say that electricity is our main problem,” he said.