ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court of Pakistan has formed a new bench to hear the Punjab government’s petition against the Lahore High Court’s order to allow the relocation of the Sharif family’s sugar mills.
A three-judge bench, headed by Justice Ijaz Ul Ahsan, will now hear the plea on October 6.
Earlier, a three-judge bench led by Justice Qazi Faez Isa and including Justice Yahya Afridi and Justice Jamal Khan Mandokhel was constituted by the Supreme Court to hear the matter.
The handover of the Sharif family’s sugar mills was contested by the provincial PTI government. The locations where cotton is grown now feature the Ittefaq, Hamza, and Ashraf Sugar Mills.
The moving of sugar mills from one district to another was forbidden by Punjab government notification in 2006. The Punjab government, however, formalized the factory’s relocation on December 4, 2015, through a different announcement, by making it clear that the prohibition notification does not apply to the relocation of the sugar crushing unit.
The government approved the owners’ requests to relocate their businesses to different districts for Chaudhry Sugar Mills, Ittefaq Sugar Mills in Sahiwal, Haseeb Waqas Sugar Mills in Nankana Sahib, Abdullah (Yousaf) Sugar Mills in Sargodha, and Abdullah Sugar Mills in Dipalpur.
The notification of the mills’ relocation from Central Punjab to South of Punjab was contested at the LHC by the owners of Indus Sugar Mills and RYK Sugar Mills as well as former secretary general of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf Jahangir Khan Tareen.
The Lahore High Court dismissed the petitions challenging the relocation of the sugar mills in 2016.
