Excerpt from Ms. Ambreen Shah's speech on the myths regarding CPEC:

Excerpt from Ms. Ambreen Shah’s (VP Legal and Corporate affairs-China Power Hub generation company Pvt Ltd) speech on the myths regarding CPEC:

1. Majority employees are Chinese and a very few are Pakistanis

Response:

• We have 2900 Pakistani employees and 1824 Chinese employees working on this project and the number is rapidly increasing.
• The Head office has equal representation. I’m a Pakistani and I’m the VP of this company.

2. CPEC will deplete our foreign exchange reserves

Response:

• According to Dr Ishrat Hussain (Ex Governor of State Bank), the payments going out of Pakistan can easily be balanced out by increasing our exports. The deficit of $900 million can easily be overcome by the revival of our energy sector and in turn in the increase of our exports.

3. China is using prisoners as employees in CPEC projects

Response:

• There are no prisoners working in our company and the two sponsors of this project have hired the best employees to ensure the success of this project.

4. CPEC projects are causing harm to the environment.

Response:

• The project we are working on is worth $2 billion and we’ve spent 20% of the project cost to bring in a technology called “Super-critical Technology”. We’ve bought a really expensive boiler from Alstom Energy-GE. The carbon emissions from this boiler are extremely low and fall under the threshold set by World Health Organization (WHO). We took this decision to protect the environment. Also, when we built the jetty in the sea, we used core locks so that the marine life isn’t affected.