Gilani's office vowed 40 pc expense cut, ends up spending more than entire allocation!

Islamabad, June 12 (ANI): Pakistan Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, who had pledged to cut the expenses of his office by forty percent last year, has ended up spending even more than the entire fund allocated for year 2007-08.

According to the budget document 'Current Expenditure on Revenue Account,' the original grant for Gilani's Secretariat was 230.9 million, while it demanded and received a supplementary grant of 169 million rupees, about 73.4 per cent of original allocation.

Therefore total spending by the PM's Office stood at 399 million rupees, which is up 20 per cent compared to allocation of 2007-08 that was 329 million, and from which the PM had announced he would cut 40 per cent, the Dawn reports.

In his last year's budget session speech in the parliament, Gilani had said: "The government has inherited a huge fiscal deficit from its predecessor and is trying to solve the problem by reducing the budgetary allocation for the Prime Minister's Secretariat by 40 per cent." imilarly, Pakistan President Asif ali Zardari's office demanded 8 million rupees apart from the original fund of 353 million rupees.

The original allocation for Defense budget was 296 billion rupees; 15.8 billion rupees in supplementary grants were issued to defense, raising the total defense spending to 311.8 rupees billion.

For the servicing of foreign debt, 64 billion rupees was allocated in the budget 2008-09, supplementary grant during mid year was at 16 billion rupees and total expenses on foreign debt servicing was 80.18 billion rupees.

For the domestic debt service government has allocated 459 billion rupees in the budget 2008-09, and a supplementary grant of 99.9 billion rupees raised the total expanse over domestic debt servicing were 558.59 billion rupees.

The smallest supplementary grant was demanded by the Foreign Affairs Division at 2000 rupees, raising the total expenses of Foreign Affairs Division to 567.902 billion rupees. (ANI)