Who Owns Pakistan - Yimg

Born in Rangoon, M A Rangoonwala had migrated to Bombay in 1933 and had
intrenched himself in business by the time Pakistan came into being as an
independene state. In 1947 he migrated to Pakistan and by 1971 he was
represented on the board of 45 companies, of rich 25 belonged to his own
Rangoonwala-Bengali group. When nationalization uprooted him for the third
time he migrated to Malaysia. Since he majored in edible oil industry , many
people in this industry see him behind Pakistan's emergence as the single
biggest importer of palm oil from Malaysia.
Like Rangoonwala, C.M. Latif was a towering personality of paksitan industry,
both in physique and achievement. He had setup Batala Engineering Company
(BECO) in Batala , East Punjab, India in 1933 and in less than a decade it came
to be ranked as one of the India's top three machine tool companies. It is said
that half of the Wagner equipment that was obtained by the British India, as war
reparation from Germany, after the Second World War was allocated to BECO.
In 1947, C.M. Latif migrated to Pakistan and set up his company with the same
name in Badami Bagh area in Lahore. By the time it was nationalized in 1971, it
had become one of the biggest engineering complexes in Pakistan which was on
the threshold of launching the domestic manufacturing of textile machinery, in
collaboration with Toyota Carporation of Japan . In 1995 when Privatization
Commission decided to dispose off BECO, (now Pakistan Engineering Company,
PECO), it had incurred losses of Rs. 365 million and the government was still
toying with the idea of indigenous manufacture of textile machnery in Pakistan.
Between 1977-95 , C M Latif had waged a one man crsusade for the return of his
unit which is currently being sold by the Privatization Commisssion in several lots
of realy estate. In an advertisement in the daily Business Recorder of February 1,
1991 C M Latif demanded return of BECO to former owners and reminisced
about his factory in the following poem, intitled ( Food for thought) .
You must learn to hate violence, love non-violence,
You must learn to fight evil, without doing evil.
You cannot banish darkness with darkness.
You cannot fight hate with hate, but only with love.
Wishing Batala Engineering ,
C.M.Latif , Former Chairman & Managing Director.
A man gifted by God to launch projects of national importance was reduced to
writing incoherent poetry. What a waste of great national asset!
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