Defence Minister Khawaja Asif on Wednesday said that the government was satisfied with the sale of the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), adding that it had great “symbolic value”.

He expressed these views on Geo News programme ‘Geo Pakistan’ when asked whether the government was satisfied with the process.

“Yes, the government is satisfied. This is the first biggest transaction of our privatisation process. This transaction has a great symbolic value,“ he said, recalling that previously First Women Bank had also been privatised but that transaction was not as big.

A consortium led by the Arif Habib group won the auction for a controlling stake in Pakistan International Airlines Corporation Ltd (PIACL) on Tuesday with a bid of Rs135 billion after a competitive, televised process, marking the country’s first major privatisation in nearly two decades.

The sale is a central plank of the government’s plan to offload loss-making state-owned enterprises and a key condition under Pakistan’s $7bn International Monetary Fund bailout programme.

Speaking about the matter on ‘Geo Pakistan’, Asif said the PIA sale had “symbolic value because of the history of this transaction“.

Four years ago, he said, the country’s entire aviation sector had suffered following a statement by a then-minister from the PTI.

He was apparently referring to former aviation minister Ghulam Sarwar Khan’s statement in June 2020 during a parliamentary session. Khan had said investigations revealed that more than 262 of the country’s 860 active pilots either held fake licences or had cheated in their exams.

Following the then-minister’s statement, European and UK authorities had ban­ned PIA from their territories, which were the airline’s most profitable routes. A number of foreign airlines had also grounded Pak­istani-origin pilots over concerns about their licences.

The developments followed the crash of a PIA flight from Lahore near Karachi’s Jinnah Inter­national Airport in 2020, killing around 100 people.

Asif said these events had led to PIA going “almost bankrupt”, adding that the government then restructured the company. “The government itself owned a big portion of its liability and only nominal liability remained,“ he said. “Against this backdrop, yesterday’s transaction is a very successful one.”

He also credited the civil aviation department for its considerable contribution in the matter and seeing the transaction through. “We went through a painstaking process,” he said, adding that PIA was now operating flights to Manchester.

The minister further stated that the airline now also had permission to operate flights to Birmingham and London, but it did not have aircraft for those flights. Similarly, he continued, PIA now also had permission to operate flights to New York and around 14-15 destinations in Europe.

The defence minister also appeared to be defending the arrangement under which the government is to receive just 7.5 per cent — around Rs10bn — of the amount from the PIA sale, saying that investing a “bigger portion” back into the airline increased its value.

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