Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb on Wednesday said that the government has handed over 24 State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) to the Privatisation Commission, stressing that the SOEs were causing a loss of “close to a Rs1 trillion every single year”. He made the remarks while addressing an event in Islamabad today. Last month, an Arif Habib group-led consortium won the auction for the airline with a bid of Rs135 billion. He elaborated that the losses suffered due to SOEs were a “huge gap”. Aurangzeb hoped that the amount could be put to a much better use going forward. He recalled that the government had to close down the Utility Stores Corporation, Pakistan Agricultural Storage and Services Corporation (PASSCO), “not because 1,000-5,000 people were employed there, but because of the subsidies that the government was providing them”. “More importantly, it was the corruption built into those subsidies that was the real cost to the exchequer,” the finance minister maintained. More to follow.