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NEW DELHI: Pakistan’s Finance Minister Miftah Ismail is resigning as the five-month-old government of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif continues to battle serious economic challenges.
“I have verbally resigned as finance minister. I will tender a formal resignation upon reaching Pakistan,“ Miftah said in a tweet on Sunday night.
“It’s been an honour to serve twice as finance minister,“ he said.
The 57-year-old businessman previously headed the Finance Ministry briefly in 2018.
Miftah made the announcement after a meeting he and Shehbaz had with former prime minister and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) chief Nawaz Sharif in Britain.
Nawaz, Shehbaz’s elder brother, lives in London in self exile, having left Pakistan in November 2019 for medical treatment abroad.
Shehbaz’s coalition government is battling a number of economic problems, including rising inflation, dwindling foreign exchange reserves, and the task of rebuilding infrastructure destroyed in the recent floods. - Bernama
