Amid rumours of a resignation. Finance Minister Ishaq Dar appeared in a press conference on Friday in an aggressive mood to ‘show the mirror’ to Imran Khan over PTI’s economic press conference.

“Why should I resign,” Dar adamantly told reporters.

“It was PTI’s bad governance that destroyed the economy,” he said, adding that it seemed that Imran’s ‘brain had been affected just like his leg’.

He added that many people had advised PDM not to table the no-confidence vote against the PTI government, but it had to be done because Imran would ‘take the country down with him’. He cited the alleged audio leaks of KP Finance Minister Taimur Jhagra and Shaukat Tarin discussing ways to stop the IMF tranche from materialising.

He once again reiterated that Pakistan will not default on its loan repayments, adding that the government’s financial woes had been worsened by historic floods last summer.

Dar said that the PTI government had undone all the progress made during the PML-N government from 2013 to 2018. He added that it would take time to fix the things the previous government had ruined.

“I can’t fix things with the push of a button,” he said, but added that the government had ‘plans’ to fix things.

The resignation rumours

Finance Minister Ishaq Dar has neither rejected nor agreed to the query related to his apparent resignation and reiterated that wait till 4:10pm today (Friday).

“4:10pm, 4:10pm, 4:10pm, 4:10pm, nothing will change in two hours,” he said when a journalist asked about the prevailing economic situation and his apparent decision to step down from the post of finance minister.

When the journalist reiterated his query that whether Dar would quit, the finance minister frowned and asked whether there was any problem with his way of work. He chuckled and made his way to the exit.

He kept on saying the time. “What he has done with this country. Everyone is aware of what he has done with the country,” he said in reply to a query that former Federal Board of Revenue Shabbar Zaidi has claimed that Dar would quit as finance czar.

Dar said that the former FBR chief should be in jail for “giving billions of rupees of refunds”.