OUR STAFF REPORTER LAHORE - Irfan Qaiser Sheikh Thursday elected LCCI President unopposed while Kashif Younas Mehar Senior vice President and Miss Saeeda Nazar Vice President. According to LCCI election schedule, September 22 was last date for filing of nominations for LCCI office-bearers for year 2011-12 and no other candidate turned up for filing nomination against Irfan Qaiser Sheikh, Kashif Younas Mehar and Miss Saeeda Nazar therefore all the three made their way to victory stand. A formal announcement, however, would be made at the Annual General Meeting scheduled for September 30. The newly elected LCCI President Irfan Qaiser Sheikh while spelling out his priorities called for tightening of belt to wear off the intensity of ongoing economic crisis. The LCCI President feared that if the belt was not tightened by both the government and the private sector, the answer would be nothing else but more poverty and joblessness. He said that tight monetary policy was not the only solution to fast increasing inflation but it could be tackled easily by increasing production and cutting unnecessary expenditures. He said that the business community would have to spend its energies for increasing exports, particularly the exports of non-traditional items. Irfan Qaiser Sheikh said that high mark-up was crushing the whole industrial sector like anything and this needs to be taken care of by the concerned authorities. The Federal Board of Revenue should also focus on simplification of taxes as existing procedures were cumbersome in comparison with other economies of the world. The LCCI President said that the main objective of the Lahore Chamber of Commerce and Industry was the promotion of trade and industry and all available resources would be utilized for economic turnaround as the economic meltdown had now started taking its toll and everybody in suffering badly. Irfan Qaiser Sheikh said that Research and Development was an area which if was given proper attention could do miracles. He said that the LCCI would, in collaboration with business community, work for the promotion of Research culture in Pakistan. Meanwhile, Pakistan Industrial and Traders Associations Front (PIAF) has congratulated the newly elected Executive Committee Members of the Lahore Chamber of Commerce and Industry and hoped that the newly elected body would utilize all their energies to come up to the expectations of the businessmen. In a statement issued here Thursday, the PIAF Chairman Engineer Sohail Lashari and Vice Chairman Junaid Iqbal Sheikh also thanked the businessmen for reposing confidence in PIAF-Founders Alliance. The PIAF Chairman said that there was no second opinion about it that the country is faced with enormous internal and external challenges and only true representatives of the business community could help surmount these issues. He said that Alliance had made an effort to bring forth very talented people to represent business community at all forums and they had been tasked to prepare sector specific working papers to expedite economic activity in the country in general and in the city of Lahore in particular.