ISLAMABAD: Chinese and Gulf investors have repeatedly emphasised to Pakistan the importance of faster approvals, policy continuity, inter-agency coordination and effective dispute-resolution mechanisms, said the secretary SIFC. “A stronger SIFC directly addresses these investor concerns by acting as a unified coordination and facilitation platform,” said Jamil Ahmad Qureshi. He added that the restructuring is aimed at making SIFC the primary body for investment approvals, coordination, facilitation and execution ahead of CPEC Phase-II and the prime minister’s upcoming visit to China.
The SIFC secretary was approached by The News to ascertain how much investment the council has attracted so far.
While the secretary did not share these details, he lamented that a deliberate media campaign is being orchestrated through social media, print articles and other media tactics to vilify the prime minister’s decision to merge the Board of Investment (BoI) into the Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC), at a time when Pakistan is seeking to centralise and streamline its investment architecture for faster economic execution.
“Much of this criticism ignores the commendable performance of SIFC in a relatively short span of time, particularly when compared with the historically suboptimal performance of the Board of Investment (BOI), which for years failed to meaningfully resolve investors’ grievances, bureaucratic fragmentation, inter-departmental delays and policy execution bottlenecks,” he said.
Despite existing for decades, he added, the BoI struggled to convert Pakistan’s investment potential into sustained, high-value foreign direct investment due to slow approvals, overlapping authorities and weak coordination mechanisms. Even open-source assessments repeatedly highlighted that BoI’s so-called “single-window” model failed in practice, particularly in Special Economic Zones (SEZs), where investors continued to deal with multiple agencies, delayed utility connections, licencing hurdles and unresolved infrastructure bottlenecks.
Pakistan’s move to merge the BoI with the Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC) signals a transition from fragmented bureaucratic handling to a centralised “singlewindow” investment architecture, he said.
For decades, the secretary noted, investors in Pakistan had to navigate overlapping ministries, provincial departments, regulators and approval chains, creating delays, uncertainty and opportunities for rent-seeking and systemic corruption.
He said the SIFC’s centralised structure reduces duplication of authority and minimises bureaucratic bottlenecks by bringing federal institutions, provinces and relevant stakeholders onto one coordinated platform. The reform aligns with repeated international concerns regarding governance inefficiencies, weak institutional coordination and corruption vulnerabilities affecting Pakistan’s investment climate.
By consolidating approvals and facilitation into a single lead mechanism, Pakistan can reduce discretionary file movement, improve investor predictability, accelerate project conversion and enhance institutional accountability.
The timing, he said, is strategically important as Pakistan transitions to CPEC Phase-II, which focuses more heavily on industrial relocation, manufacturing, business-to-business investment, Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and export-oriented growth.
If coupled with digital tracking, public disclosure standards, time-bound approvals and institutional oversight, the SIFC model can significantly mitigate the governance issues that have historically slowed investment inflows into Pakistan, he said.
He emphasised that the broader significance of the reform is not merely an administrative merger; rather, it represents Pakistan’s attempt to shift from slow, procedural governance to execution-based economic management.
