The Sell-Off
How Pakistan’s Rulers Packaged a Nation’s Infrastructure as a Gulf Investment Story
The branch on Shahrah-e-Faisal has been there since 1989. It does not look like much from the outside, the kind of government building that accumulates paint layers and photocopied notices on its glass doors, with a queue of women that forms before the tellers arrive. First Women Bank was not built to look like much. It was built by Benazir Bhutto to do something specific: to put a bank branch in the hands of women who had never been inside one, to offer a small business loan to a woman whose husband’s signature had always been the precondition for her financial existence.
That was the mandate. That was what the 42 branches across Pakistan were for. On October 16, 2025, the federal cabinet of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan approved the sale of its entire 82.64 percent stake in First Women Bank Limited to a special purpose holding company incorporated in Abu Dhabi called Eve Holdings RSC Limited, a company with no prior banking operations anywhere in the world, for $14.6 million.
Fourteen point six million dollars. Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars per branch. Less than the cost of a mid-tier apartment in the Dubai Marina, for each branch of an institution carrying 36 years of depositor history and a nationwide footprint built with public money.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif stood at the signing ceremony and called the deal “the first drop of rain.” He was not wrong about the metaphor. What follows a first drop of rain is a flood. The question he did not answer, and that no one in the room thought to ask publicly, is whose fields the water runs toward.
The Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan released a statement this week that has been reprinted across the financial press, including in Dawn, under headlines celebrating Pakistan’s investment momentum. The SECP announced that 79 new foreign companies commenced operations in Pakistan over the past three years, while foreign firms invested Rs 40.7 billion, approximately $145 million, in key sectors during the same period.
The SECP’s statement was not spontaneous. It was defensive. In the days before its release, reports had circulated citing 125 foreign companies as having ceased operations in Pakistan. The SECP corrected that figure (the 125 includes every company exit since 1977, not just the last three years) and used the correction to build a counter-narrative about investment confidence. The press release landed, the newspapers published it, and the original question about capital flight disappeared inside the headline about 79 new arrivals.
Read against the State Bank of Pakistan’s data published the same week, however, the SECP’s numbers construct a picture so different from the press release’s intent that the gap between the two documents becomes the story.
In the first seven months of fiscal year 2025-26, from July 2025 through January 2026, foreign companies operating in Pakistan repatriated $1.68 billion in profits and dividends. That is the money leaving. It moved outward at a pace 11.6 times larger than the $145 million the SECP is presenting as a three-year investment achievement. In the same seven-month period, net FDI inflows fell 41 percent year-on-year, dropping to $981 million from $1.66 billion in the same period the previous year. The power sector alone sent $400.2 million in profits abroad. Financial services sent $371.3 million. Outflows from the food sector rose sharply to $142.4 million.
United Kingdom-based investors repatriated the highest total: $442.8 million in seven months. Chinese investors, Dutch entities, and American firms followed. The State Bank’s data is granular, verifiable, and publicly available. The SECP press release cites none of it.
When the government of Pakistan presents Rs 40.7 billion attracted over three years as evidence of investor confidence while $1.68 billion departs in seven months, it is not making a statistical error. It is constructing a specific version of economic reality for a specific audience: the international financial institutions that Pakistan needs for its next tranche, the Gulf governments that Pakistan needs for its debt rollovers, and its own population, which it needs to keep from asking the questions the numbers would otherwise produce.
The 79 companies themselves warrant scrutiny. The SECP does not break down their sectoral composition, their registered capital, or their employment generation. It counts arrivals and presents arrival as investment. A significant portion of the transactions it highlights as evidence of foreign enthusiasm are, by the SECP’s own description, the result of “global portfolio restructuring among multinational corporations”: Shell sold its Pakistan operations to Saudi Arabia’s Wafi Energy as part of Shell’s global reorganization; Lotte Chemical’s ownership shifted to Dubai-based PTA Global Holdings following an international agreement between Lotte Chemical and TotalEnergies; Switzerland’s Gunvor Group and Total Parco divided TotalEnergies Pakistan between themselves. These are asset transfers inside multinational corporate structures. No new productive capital entered Pakistan through any of these transactions. The factories already existed. The employees were already working. Ownership certificates changed hands in Geneva and Dubai, and the SECP logged them as investment activity.
Zoom out from the press release and what comes into focus is an architecture. Not a spontaneous market response to Pakistan’s improving investment climate, but a structured, politically engineered transfer of Pakistani state assets and infrastructure to Gulf entities, conducted through a legal instrument designed specifically to prevent the kind of scrutiny that competitive tendering would require.
The instrument is the Inter-Governmental Commercial Transactions Act of 2022. Its text states explicitly that its provisions “shall have effect notwithstanding anything inconsistent therewith contained in the Companies Act, 2017, the Privatization Commission Ordinance, 2000, the Public Procurement Regulatory Authority Ordinance, 2002, the Public-Private Partnership Authority Act, 2017,” or any other law currently in force. In plain language: the Act overrides Pakistan’s public procurement rules, its privatization commission framework, and its companies legislation simultaneously. There are no provisions mandating a neutral valuation of state assets. No requirement for due diligence. No requirement for a cost-benefit analysis comparing the G2G transaction against what standard privatization or public-private partnership processes might produce for the Pakistani public. The Act also extends broad immunity to officials acting in their official capacity, limiting the scope of accountability proceedings. Legal analysts writing in Pakistan’s press described this configuration at the Act’s passage as a framework that “tramples principles of fairness, transparency, and accountability.”
In 2023, parliament granted additional powers to the caretaker government specifically to continue executing transactions under this Act, ensuring that asset transfers initiated under one political arrangement could survive the transition to the next without interruption.
First Women Bank was sold under this framework. The buyer, Abu Dhabi’s International Holding Company, operating through its special purpose vehicle Eve Holdings, simultaneously deployed another subsidiary, International Resources Holding, into a joint venture with the Government of Balochistan in February 2025. That deal covers natural resource extraction in a province sitting on copper, gold, and coal deposits that have been the subject of foreign extraction interest for decades. Two transactions, one conglomerate: financial sector access through one vehicle, resource extraction rights through another, both outside competitive tender, both within months of each other.
The Special Investment Facilitation Council sits at the center of this process. The SIFC was established on June 20, 2023. Its apex committee is co-chaired by the Prime Minister and the Chief of Army Staff, with federal ministers, provincial chief ministers, and senior military officials comprising the full council. Its formal mandate was to act as a single window to fast-track investment. Its founding notification, issued from the Prime Minister’s Office on June 17, 2023, stated explicitly that the SIFC was constituted following a meeting “with regard to attracting investment from GCC countries in the fields of Defence, Agriculture, Minerals, IT and Energy.” The council was not designed to attract global investment broadly. It was designed to attract Gulf investment specifically, with the army structurally embedded in every tier of its decision-making.
The SIFC is not a regulatory body. It is an accelerant. It moves transactions that would normally travel through civilian ministries, parliamentary committees, and competitive bidding processes through a channel answerable primarily to the army’s institutional interests and Gulf counterpart governments. In 2025, an IMF diagnostic assessment on governance and corruption identified the SIFC as a major governance concern, noting its broad legal immunity for officials, many from the armed forces, and its authority to exempt projects from regulatory requirements. The IMF report called for an end to special treatment for “influential public sector entities” in government contracts.
DP World’s entry into Pakistan’s logistics infrastructure shows how the channel works in practice.
The National Logistics Corporation was founded in 1978 after a wheat supply crisis paralyzed Karachi Port and the Pakistan Army was called in to resolve it. The NLC emerged from that emergency as an independent entity, but it has never truly separated from the institution that created it. Its director general is a serving major general, appointed on the recommendation of the Chief of Army Staff. It operates under the Ministry of Planning, Development and Special Initiatives. It is described by its own documentation as the logistics arm of the Pakistan Army. The NLC is the institution through which Pakistan’s military-state controls the movement of domestic freight.
In January 2024, Pakistan and the UAE signed two inter-governmental framework agreements: one for a dedicated rail freight corridor, one for an economic zone near Karachi, together covering more than $3 billion in planned investments. DP World was designated to act on behalf of Dubai. The NLC and Port Qasim Authority were designated to act on behalf of Pakistan.
The Competition Commission of Pakistan approved the joint venture in March 2025. The structure gives NLC 60 percent equity across two joint venture companies: one for logistics services, one for road freight. DP World holds 40 percent. The 60-40 split has been cited repeatedly in Pakistani official communications as evidence that domestic interests remain in control.
This is not how logistics works. DP World operates in more than 75 countries. Its commercial value is not its equity stake in a joint venture. It is its operational architecture: the global network integration, the relationships with major shipping lines, the supply chain protocols that connect Karachi to Rotterdam and Jebel Ali and Singapore within a single system. When DP World and NLC launched the first feeder service from Jebel Ali to Karachi, then the first direct Pakistan-Bangladesh container route cutting transit times by more than 50 percent, those routes were commercially viable because of DP World’s global routing system. The NLC provided the state’s domestic footprint. DP World provided everything that made the routes worth using.
Phase one of the Karachi-Pipri freight corridor broke ground in January 2026. It will rehabilitate 52 kilometers of rail connecting Karachi Port to the Pipri marshalling yard, alongside a multimodal logistics park integrating rail, road, and port operations into a single hub. DP World is committing $400 million, with an initial injection of $20 million. Pakistan Railways is the third partner. Once operational, Pakistan’s primary import-export corridor, the physical chokepoint through which nearly all goods entering or leaving the country move, will run through infrastructure partly built, partly financed, and operationally integrated by a state corporation of the Government of Dubai.
President Asif Ali Zardari met DP World’s Group Chairman Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem in Abu Dhabi in January 2026. His office said he “reaffirmed the government of Pakistan’s commitment to providing institutional facilitation and fast-track approvals to partner enterprises.” That is the language of a government ensuring its Gulf partner encounters no friction. It is not the language of a government protecting a national asset.
The financial architecture is being built in parallel with the physical one. Mashreq Bank, a UAE institution, has launched what it describes as Pakistan’s first digital bank and is expanding operations. Kuwait-backed Raqami Digital Bank, channeled through the Gulf investment pipeline, has announced a $100 million investment. The UAE telecom group e&, through its 23.4 percent effective economic interest in PTCL, now holds a position inside Pakistan’s dominant fixed-line telecom infrastructure, and through PTCL’s acquisition of Telenor Pakistan’s operations, inside a major mobile network as well.
Saudi Aramco purchased a 40 percent equity stake in Gas & Oil Pakistan Limited. Abu Dhabi Ports is developing logistics infrastructure alongside DP World at the Pipri site. Saudi Arabia’s Waqub Data Company secured 80 percent of Pakistani technology firm Woot Tech. The SECP counts that last transaction as evidence of foreign interest in Pakistan’s digital sector. The more precise description is that a Pakistani technology company was sold majority-owned to a Saudi buyer, at terms that have not been publicly disclosed, through processes that the IGCTA exempts from standard regulatory scrutiny.
Together these transactions describe not an investment story but a capture sequence. Ports. Rail. Road freight. Banking. Telecom. Digital infrastructure. Energy supply. Each sector entered through a different Gulf entity, all coordinated through the SIFC framework, all executed under the Inter-Governmental Commercial Transactions Act, all announced by Pakistani government officials as evidence of confidence and partnership.
Tariq Ali’s long analysis of Pakistan’s ruling class is necessary here to understand what is otherwise opaque. The class that governs Pakistan, the civil-military bureaucracy, the major political families, the business houses with connections to both, has never derived its legitimacy from domestic productive capacity. It has derived it from its usefulness to foreign patrons. In the Cold War, that patron was primarily Washington. The military received equipment, training, and political protection. The civilian elite received access to international financial systems, dollar accounts, and immunity from accountability. Pakistan provided geography, intelligence cooperation, and the willingness to host whatever the patron needed hosted.
The patron has changed. Washington’s appetite for Pakistan diminished sharply after the Taliban’s return to Kabul in August 2021 removed the strategic rationale that had defined the relationship for two decades. The Gulf states, particularly the UAE and Saudi Arabia, stepped into the space. They provide the debt rollovers that keep Pakistan’s external accounts from collapsing. They absorb Pakistani labor: Saudi Arabia alone directed 62.2 percent of Pakistan’s registered overseas workers in 2024, and together the Gulf states generate the remittance flows that are among the most critical components of Pakistan’s foreign exchange position. The UAE remitted $5.5 billion to Pakistan in fiscal year 2024, the second-largest source after Saudi Arabia’s $7.4 billion. And now the Gulf states are acquiring the infrastructure.
The ruling class does not experience this as subordination. It experiences it as opportunity. Every G2G transaction generates commission structures, facilitation fees, and political goodwill that translates into protection. The SIFC’s military co-chairmanship ensures that the institution with the most to gain from Gulf favor, the army, which requires UAE and Saudi political backing to maintain its domestic political position and benefits from the Gulf states’ longstanding absorption of Pakistani military personnel into their security structures, is the institution running the investment pipeline. The civilian government provides the signatures. The army provides the assurance that those signatures will hold regardless of which party wins the next election.
This is the function the Inter-Governmental Commercial Transactions Act was built to serve. A deal signed under its provisions requires no parliamentary ratification of its specific terms. It requires no competitive tender that might produce a higher valuation for a state asset like First Women Bank. It generates no public disclosure that would allow a journalist, a parliamentarian, or a civil society organization to interrogate whether $14.6 million was a fair price for a 36-year-old banking institution with 42 branches, a mandated focus on women’s financial inclusion, and a depositor base built over more than three decades with public money. It moves quickly, quietly, and with the full institutional weight of two governments behind it.
The Dawn article published this week presented none of this. It reprinted the SECP’s press release, cited the 79 companies and the Rs 40.7 billion figure, named DP World, Abu Dhabi Ports, Saudi Aramco, and Wafi Energy as participants in Pakistan’s investment revival, and closed with a line about sustained confidence in Pakistan’s business environment. It described as investment momentum a process that the State Bank’s own data shows is producing net capital outflows at historic scale.
This is not an accident of journalism. The SECP press release was timed to specific political pressure. The Dawn story ran it without asking what the Rs 40.7 billion figure represents against $1.68 billion leaving in seven months; without asking what competitive process determined that First Women Bank was worth $14.6 million; without asking what operational control a 40 percent DP World stake in Pakistan’s freight corridor produces at scale; without asking who inside the SIFC is making decisions that commit Pakistani state assets to Gulf entities for decades, under a law that explicitly overrides the procurement, privatization, and corporate governance frameworks that would otherwise apply.
The beneficiaries of this narrative are the government that needs it to survive its next IMF review, the military institution that needs Gulf support to maintain its domestic political position, and the Gulf entities that need Pakistani state cooperation to continue acquiring infrastructure at valuations and on terms that would not survive open-market exposure.
What is being constructed in Pakistan, through the SIFC and the G2G framework and the Inter-Governmental Commercial Transactions Act, is a new form of dependency. It does not look like the old colonialism: no foreign administrators in the offices, no flags above the buildings, no occupation in the conventional sense. DP World’s employees in Karachi are Pakistani. The bankers running the post-acquisition First Women Bank will be Pakistani. The logistics workers moving containers through the Pipri corridor will be Pakistani. The institutions that own the infrastructure, set the operational protocols, determine the fee structures, and extract the returns will be in Abu Dhabi and Dubai.
This is the architecture of modern subordination. It functions through contract, not conquest. The contracts are signed by Pakistani officials with full legal authority and celebrated by Pakistani prime ministers as milestones. The financial flows produced by those contracts move in one direction with increasing efficiency, as the State Bank’s repatriation data confirms, while the government issues press releases about the investment figures going in.
The 42 branches of First Women Bank will continue to serve depositors. The Karachi-Pipri freight corridor will, when complete, move containers faster than it does today. The logistics park at Pipri will be modern and functional. None of this is in dispute. Infrastructure built with foreign capital that extracts a return is still infrastructure. The question that Pakistan’s press, parliament, and civil society have been structurally discouraged from asking is: at what price, under what terms, with what recourse, and who negotiated on behalf of the Pakistani public whose assets were on the table.
Benazir Bhutto built First Women Bank with public money and a public mandate. It was sold for $14.6 million to a company that did not exist as a banking entity before it bought it, under a law designed to prevent the kind of scrutiny that might have produced a higher price or a different buyer. Prime Minister Sharif called it the first drop of rain.