KARACHI: Federal Minister for Inter-Provincial Coordin­ation (IPC) Dr Fehmida Mirza informed on Saturday that the Punjab government has been asked to hand over the Pakistan Football Federation (PFF) headquarters to the FIFA-appointed Normalisation Com­m­ittee in order to get football back on track in the country.

The Punjab government had in November seized control of the PFF headquarters from the court-elected federation of Ashfaq Hussain Shah, whose earlier takeover of the headquarters from the Haroon Malik-led NC has seen FIFA suspend Pakistan in April last year.

“We have written a letter to the Punjab government to hand over the PFF headquarters back to the NC,” Fehmida told Dawn.

The issue of the handover has been dragging on since the government decided to side with the NC in its long-running dispute with Ashfaq’s PFF, which came into power following an election held by the Supreme Court in December 2018 and claims that the NC isn’t sincere in holding elections.

The NC had been in talks with the IPC ministry since to get the PFF headquarters vacated but the breakthrough came after the NC gave an eight-month roadmap for holding fresh elections of the PFF.

“We had talked over a lot of things and most of them have been resolved with the PFF incl­u­ding the timeline for the elections and the only issue regarding the headquarters remains.

Published in Dawn, January 30th, 2022