EDITORIAL: A finance ministry report released last week has finally shed light on what many had long been pointing out: the absence of structured transparency in the Special Investment Facilitation Council’s (SIFC’s) initiatives is eroding policy predictability and, in turn, sapping investor confidence. That, ironically, had been the very outcome the body was created to prevent. As reported in media, the finance ministry document, titled Prime Minister’s Economic Governance Reforms Agenda, was prepared under the action plan of the IMF’s Governance and Corruption Diagnostic Assessment and meets a key condition of its loan programme requiring Pakistan to publish a roadmap addressing governance and corruption vulnerabilities. The report’s findings underscore a deeper tension: reform commitments made to international lenders are increasingly colliding with opaque domestic institutional practices that continue to unsettle investors. It is important to note here that when the SIFC was established in 2023, it was designed to address growing investor frustration with Pakistan’s disjointed, slow-paced governance architecture. Complaints, particularly from Gulf partners, highlighted chronic coordination failures between federal ministries, provincial authorities and regulators, with viable projects routinely bogged down in overlapping mandates and bureaucratic deadlock. The council was thus envisioned as a single-window platform to streamline approvals, cut red tape and coordinate a whole-of-government approach with high-level oversight, targeting key sectors like IT, energy, mining, agriculture and defence. Its broader aim was structural: to shift from a debt-fuelled economic model to an investment-driven one, with greater ease of doing business and a more credible policy environment. While the SIFC has helped ease some procedural bottlenecks and improved coordination across government entities, public access to consolidated information on the concessions it has facilitated remains limited. The absence of routine, structured disclosures on tax breaks, policy exemptions and waivers has created uncertainty over the rationale, costs and outcomes of what the authorities view as ‘strategic’ investments, weakening confidence in the governance framework underpinning them. This opacity has also blurred the line between the SIFC’s intended facilitative role and the wide discretionary powers it has been granted under the Board of Investment Act, a concern explicitly flagged by the IMF, particularly with regard to the Act’s Articles 10F and 10G, which appear to concentrate the SIFC’s authority over federal and regulatory institutions, and grant immunity to its members. Greater transparency is clearly needed to monitor how these powers are exercised, and ensure they do not undermine the wider governance framework and translate into tangible investment gains without imposing hidden fiscal or regulatory costs. As things stand, the current model risks delivering short-term wins for select projects while leaving broader investment constraints unaddressed. Moreover, the parallel existence of the BOI (Board of Investment) alongside the SIFC has raised questions on overlapping mandates and unclear accountability. These must also be addressed. Beyond the aforementioned shortcomings and ambiguities in the SIFC’s functioning, a more fundamental reality must also be acknowledged: Pakistan’s investment drought was never going to be resolved by a single facilitation body. Structural deterrents run deep, ranging from a punitive tax regime anchored in minimum taxation on turnover regardless of profitability and multiple withholding tax rates applicable at each stage of business transactions, to prohibitively high energy costs, weak regulatory enforcement, and a persistently volatile political and security environment. These constraints sit well outside the SIFC’s remit, a limitation acknowledged by its national coordinator as recently as last month. The outcome is telling: the SIFC has yet to catalyse entirely new foreign investment flows since its inception. While it can still serve as an effective conduit for facilitating FDI, this will require addressing transparency and accountability concerns around its working, alongside a candid recognition that meaningful investment revival demands deeper, economy-wide reforms that no single institution can deliver on its own. Copyright Business Recorder, 2026