Private school’s lawyer apologizes to SC for disputing court order

F.P. Report

ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court on Tuesday conducted hearing into a case against two private schools for writing outrageous letters on court orders over fee reduction.

A three-member bench headed by Justice Gulzar Ahmed conducted the proceedings.

In the previous hearing, the Supreme Court had come down hard on two private schools in Islamabad that both failed to reduce their fees by 20% and sent letters to parents calling the court’s order ‘evil’.

Justice Gulzar sought copy of letter of another school, saying he had only seen one of them.

He asked about chief operating officer of the school, to which, counsel of the school responded that the CEO was on a foreign visit and would return soon.

The SC judge said the school had termed the Supreme Court’s decision of fee hike as ‘unjust’. “Is it your domain to call court verdicts as just or unjust,” he asked. The lawyer apologized to the court for the school’s statement.

The hearing of the case was adjourned for an indefinite period.

In December last year, then chief justice Pakistan Mian Saqib Nisar had ordered all private schools across Pakistan to cut down their fees by 20%.

The case of exorbitant fees charged by private schools was heard at the Supreme Court where the chief justice directed FIA to freeze bank accounts of Lahore Grammar School (LGS) and the Beaconhouse School System (BSS) while further giving orders to the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) to initiate investigation against both the schools.

The legal counsel of private schools Ayesha Hamid apprised the court that all schools were willing to decrease fees by 8 percent, to which the chief justice remarked that the proposed reduction was way too less.