The Pakistan Business Council (PBC) on Friday installed Ziad Bashir as its chairman, with the Gul Ahmed Textile Mills director taking charge of the advocacy platform for a term of 18 months.
Bashir has been vice chairman since February 2025 and sits on the Council’s board of directors. At 48, he is one of the youngest people to have held the post since the body was formed in 2005.
Syed Hyder Ali, chief executive and managing director of Packages Limited and a long-serving member of the Council’s board of governors, assumes the office of vice chairman for the same eighteen-month term.
The Council was created as a policy advocacy platform by fourteen of the country’s biggest business groups. Its membership now stands at 102 companies, together responsible for around 40% of national exports, 25% of tax receipts and 11% of GDP.
The incoming chairman arrives with a broad policy record. He is a member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council and founding chairman of the Pakistan Retail Business Council, a body he set up to give the formal retail sector organised representation in policymaking. His work at the PBC has spanned export competitiveness, tax base reform, market access, privatisation and retail documentation, and he has carried private-sector positions into engagements with the Finance Ministry, the Federal Board of Revenue and multilateral lenders.
Bashir also holds the office of Honorary Consul General of Denmark in Karachi. In 2025 he received the Knight’s Cross of the Order of the Dannebrog, conferred in recognition of his role in building commercial and cultural links between Pakistan and Denmark. He serves on the board of the Citizens Archive of Pakistan, an organisation working on preservation of the national record and heritage education in schools.
At Gul Ahmed, he founded Ideas by Gul Ahmed, the group’s retail arm and today one of the largest retail chains in the country.
Commenting on the appointment, Bashir said the Council’s standing rested on the quality of its analysis rather than the volume of its demands.
“The PBC has never been a body that asks government for favours, and it should not become one,” he said. “Our members carry a meaningful share of the country’s exports and its tax collection. That gives us standing, but it also obliges us to bring properly worked proposals rather than general complaints.”
He said his eighteen months would be spent on export competitiveness, broadening the tax base, lowering the cost of doing business, and building conditions in which Pakistani firms have a reason to grow larger rather than stay small and fragmented.
“There is no shortage of good analysis in Pakistan. There is a shortage of follow-through,” he said. “I would rather this Council be judged at the end of my term on two or three things that genuinely changed than on how much we proposed.”
2026-08-07 18:30:00
