Ashraf W. Tabani (December 17, 1930 — July 16, 2009) was the Governor of Sindh and the Provincial Minister of Finance, Industries, Excise and Taxation between 1981 and 1984 during Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq's term of office as the President of Pakistan.[1]
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Ashraf was born in Rangoon, Burma. His family migrated to India soon after he was born. He was only 3 months old when his father died; his mother died when Ashraf was the age of 15. At the age of 18 he went to the University of Pennsylvania in the United States. He had 8 siblings, 7 brothers and 1 sister (Habib Wali Mohammad, his elder brother, is a ghazal singer).
After Pakistan achieved its independence from the British in 1947, he and a few of his brothers migrated to Karachi. He married Amina Gani, a South African, in1954. His first child, Mohsin, was born in India around the year of 1955. His second child was a girl named Kauser and his third child, another boy named Feroze, was born in December 1963.
On January 1, 2009, Ashraf had his second heart attack after which he went through bypass surgery. He traveled twice to Switzerland for the conferences of the International Labour Organization. Two weeks after he returned he had another heart attack. He died on July 16, 2009 in Karachi, leaving a wife, 3 children and 11 grandchildren. He is buried in Karachi at the mevashan graveyard.
In the early 1970s, he and a few of his brothers put up a textile mill in Karachi named Shalimar textiles. Shalimar textiles came to an end in the mid 1980s.
He was part of the International Labor Organization for a period of over 30 years. He served a term as the President there as well. In the early 1990s, he along with his two sons put up a sugar mill known as Seri Sugar Mills Ltd on the outskirts of Hyderabad. In the year 2004 Mr. Tabani bought another Sugar Mill one of the oldest in Pakistan namely Fauji Sugar Mills. Now it has been renamed Tando Mohammad Khan Sugar Mills Ltd.
www.ilo.org www.governorsindh.gov.pk