Speaking at the ceremony Minister for Defence and Chairman PIA, Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar welcomed the scheme and said that implementation of this scheme in State owned enterprises was the vision of Z A Bhutto and Benazir Bhutto which is being fulfilled by our distinguished President of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari.
He said that the peoples government has always motivated the employees of PIA to make it a world class airline and was confident that empowerment of employees would strengthen sense of motivation, ownership and would result in more efficiency, productivity leading to profitability of the Airline.
It may be mentioned that under this scheme units equivalent to 12 per cent of government share holding valuing more than Rs 2 billion owned by the federal government were being distributed amongst the employees free of cost. Over 16,000 thousand employees on the payrolls of PIA on August 14th 2009 would benefit.
PIA Employees Empower-ment Trust has been created as Trustee of the shares. Federal government has transferred 12 per cent of the share holding to the Trust. For each completed year of the service the employees would be entitled to a unit certificate. However, an employee of 20 or more years of service shall be entitled to 20 units.
In case of contractual employees five years service shall entitle them to one unit and each successive year shall be entitled one additional unit. During the service, the unit holder shall be entitled to 50 per cent dividend if announced by the PIA. The rest of the 50 per cent shall be transferred to the Privatisation Commission. Upon retirement the employee shall be entitled to the market value of the unit which shall be ascertained by the Privatization Commission.-PR