Prime Minister Imran Khan said in Islamabad that approved ‘One Stop Service’ (OSS) in SEZs model, jointly formulated by the CPEC Authority and Board of Investment (BoI), aimed at facilitating investors.
According to BoI’s communication with other concerned Ministries, one such window for facilitation is envisaged that provides facilitation of time-bound accelerated processing of applications through One-Stop Service (OSS) for all essential services, clearances, licenses, and permits that are required by the SEZ investors to set up their businesses in the SEZs.
The communication says that in the past, many attempts have been made at federal and provincial levels to provide investment facilitation through the creation of such one windows to expedite the provision of public services.
However, none of these attempts could enable the end-to-end provision of services to industrial users, owing to the lack of legal cover and administrative coordination to enable a special regime to override the general provisions in the existing legal statutes.
Board of Investment, being the premier investment promotion agency and Secretariat for SEZs across Pakistan, as well as, secretariat for industrial cooperation under the framework of CPEC, has ventured into the creation of an all-inclusive facilitation model that could enable end-to-end industrial services to the investors of SEZs.
Consequently, over the span of the last 5 months, in pursuance of PM’s direction to establish a one-window for SEZs, BoI has held consultations with major government departments that an investor has to deal with.
This exercise not only involved getting to know their procedures and requirements and the technical expertise involved but also the intent behind their relevant statutes towards the protection of public interest at large.
