Attock Refinery Ltd said on Tuesday it’s temporarily shutting down one of its main processing units for eight days owing to “ullage constraints” arising out of low demand for furnace oil. Ullage refers to the empty space in a refinery’s storage tanks. In other words, buyers of furnace oil aren’t lifting the product from the refinery, which has forced the crude oil processor to halt operations f
Two of the country’s financial managers — past and present — cannot agree on whether the national economy is still in the red or out of danger. In interviews with private media broadcast on Tuesday night, Finance Minister Ishaq Dar and his predecessor Miftah Ismail put forward their views on the state of Pakistan’s economy: while Mr Dar argued that the country’s performance criteria were up to
The stock market observed lacklustre activity on Monday as investors sold stocks to book profits. Topline Securities said worries about economic and political conditions kept investors on the sidelines. Ahsan Mehanti of Arif Habib Corporation said stock prices went down across the board owing to the foreign exchange crisis that’s been hurting industrial units. Companies belonging to th
PAKISTAN’S foreign exchange reserves have dropped to a nearly four-year low of $6.7bn — just about enough to cover four to five weeks of imports, according to the State Bank’s numbers released on Thursday. The same day, the SBP governor, Jameel Ahmad, said in a podcast that all debt repayments are on track and foreign exchange reserves are expected to increase in the second half of the current
The Nishat Group said on Monday it has increased its shareholding in MCB Bank by purchasing more than 65 million shares from one of the bank’s foreign shareholders, Bugis Investments Ltd. MCB Bank’s seven existing shareholders — three companies and four individuals — have acquired the shares from Bugis, a wholly owned subsidiary of Fullerton Financial Holdings Ltd. The foreign investor sold