Pakistan stock exchange resumes trading after 2-hour halt on fire

There were no casualties and the fire has been contained, said Farrukh Khan, chief executive officer at Pakistan Stock Exchange. The situation is under control and employees have been allowed to get back into their offices, the exchange said in a statement.

The market will follow the standard designated time schedule for the rest of the trading session without any change, said the bourse in the statement.

The trading was first about an hour after it opened at 932am local time to give brokerage houses time to connect to the back-up servers.

The benchmark Index has gained about 30% in dollar terms year-to-date and is one of the best performers globally, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The gauge was little changed on Monday before trading was suspended.

Trading started on schedule but several brokerage houses were having issues, said Bilal Khan, head of institutional equity sales at Arif Habib in Karachi.

The fire started one hour before trading was slated to begin and employees were not allowed inside the building, said Humayun Javed, CEO at WE Financial Services, which has an office in the building. The fire started at one of the brokerage houses and it didn’t spread out, he said.