ISLAMABAD: The All Pakistan Textile Mills Association (APTMA) has demanded of the SNGPL to immediately withdraw arrears from the gas bills of all its member mills and cease all coercive recovery actions, including disconnection, surcharges, adverse credit entries, or legal proceedings, in relation to the arrears.
In a letter to the SNGPL, Secretary General APTMA Shahid Sattar said that the representative body of Pakistan’s textile sector, who are industrial and export-oriented gas consumers directly affected by the multi-year RLNG arrears recently billed by SNGPL in July 2025.
Following the commencement of LNG imports, the federal government, through SRO 405(I)/2015, placed RLNG under the petroleum products framework.
June 2015 to June 2022: Aptma urges Ogra to defer RLNG bills’ payment
The ECC decisions of May 6, 2015, 27 July 2015, and June 14, 2016 further delegated to OGRA a monthly, ring-fenced pricing mechanism, under which provisional RLNG prices are adjusted in subsequent periods after verification of final cost components. According to the APTMA, this framework is expressly designed to rest on transparent disclosure, prudence review, and due process, and requires prospective application of tariff adjustments.
In this context, Section 8 of the OGRA Ordinance, 2002 mandates a prospective tariff framework confined to financial year timelines, while Section 6 requires fairness, transparency, reasoned decision-making, and stakeholder participation.
Contrary to these provisions, the SNGPL issued RLNG “actualisation” bills in July 2025, consolidating alleged adjustments for June 2015 to June 2022 into a single billing cycle.
The due date of 12 August 2025, later extended to 22 August 2025 following industry protest, was imposed without prior notice, disclosure of month-wise workbooks, allocation keys, meter-correction logs, cargo-wise cost sheets, foreign-exchange settlements, or machine-readable models, and without any opportunity of hearing.
Background and earlier representation of August 8, 2025, the APTMA urgently highlighted that members had received bills amounting to hundreds of millions of rupees in respect of alleged actualization” of provisional RLNG billing for the period June 2015 to June 2022- nearly a decade of retrospective adjustments-with a payment deadline of August 12, 2025.
“We strongly protested at that time that the arrears had been imposed without any prior explanation, detailed calculations, or reconciliations,” Sattar said, adding that during much of the relevant period RLNG rates were expressly capped at USD 6.5/MMBtu or USD 9/MMBtu with no clarification as to how these ceilings had been incorporated into the adjustments.
The issuance of massive, retrospective bills without transparency would devastate an industry already under severe liquidity stress, placing entire manufacturing operations at risk of shutdown.
The APTMA requested a minimum 20-day deferment to allow reconciliation of consumption records with the amounts billed and that all consumers be furnished with detailed month-by-month RLNG consumption data, provisional rates, actualised rates, and the calculation of any alleged differentials. Following this, the SNGPL extended the payment deadline to August 22, 2025 and issued revised bills. However, the arrears demand itself was not withdrawn, and all underlying legal and procedural concerns remain unaddressed.
The arrears remain unlawful, arbitrary, and commercially oppressive, for the following reasons: i. Contravention of Judicial Precedent: The Lahore High Court in Ejaz Textile Mills Ltd vs Federation of Pakistan (PLD 2020 Lah 261) prohibited multi-year retrospective RLNG adjustments. That binding judgment remains in force and has neither been modified nor set aside.
Ultra Vires OGRA Framework: The OGRA Ordinance, 2002 permits only prospective tariff determinations, and any multi-year retrospective recovery without express legislative mandate is beyond lawful authority. Such retrospective consolidation is inconsistent with OGRA’s statutory tariff process and is in direct violation of Article 10A of the Constitution of Pakistan, which guarantees due process. The APTMA was of the view that RLNG Supply Agreements permit short-term true-ups “in the subsequent billing period” - not a lump-sum demand for several years’ adjustments.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2025
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