Fin min firm on divestment plan
Three public sector gas companies have declined to offload their shares in the capital market, in defiance of a directive of the highest authority of the government, finance ministry officials said. The state-owned companies — Bangladesh Gas Fields Company Ltd, Gas Transmission Company Ltd and Sylhet Gas Fields Ltd — operating as subsidiaries of Petrobangla, last week informed the finance ministry about their inabilities which irked finance officials.
The officials proposed that finance minister AMA Muhith should order stern actions against top officials of the state firms for their alleged disobedience, sources said.
‘Their unwillingness and arguments for not going with the government’s road map of divesting shares are not acceptable to us,’ a senior finance ministry official told New Age on Friday.
He said the finance minister had instructed them to identify the officials and directors of the three companies who stood against the divestment plan of the government.
In a letter, Petrobangla requested the finance ministry to exclude the names of its three subsidiary companies from the divestment list of the government.
The letter also said the companies concerned currently don’t need any fresh fund to be raised from public through offloading stakes in the stock exchanges. A number of multilateral lending agencies including World Bank and Asian Development Bank have been funding the development projects of the companies concerned, the letter said.
Finance ministry officials, however, said the twin objectives of the plan of offloading stakes of 27 state-owned enterprises were to make good shares available in the capital market and to establish more accountability in the operations and governance at the state firms.
The WB and the ADB, two major lenders in the country’s economy and development, also hold the view that considerable stakes of public sector companies should be offloaded in the stock market, they added.
Finance officials binned the arguments of Petrobangla saying that the SoE share divestment move was not taken to source money for the government.
‘The government is serious to make sure that the country’s capital market has shares of good state-owned companies. The government’s intention will benefit investors,’ a finance ministry official told New Age.
Early this month, the Bank and Financial Institution Division under the finance ministry asked 20 SoEs to offload their shares without further delay, in compliance of a directive by prime minister Sheikh Hasina.
The division sought clarification from the errant companies for their repeated failure despite reminders from the ministry.
A few of the errant SoEs even missed five to six times the deadlines set for their share offloading purpose, the official added.
Sheikh Hasina in November 2010 had approved a proposal put forward by the finance ministry to offload considerable stakes of 27 SoEs.
The finance ministry set deadlines for offloading of the companies’ shares and fixed number of shares to be divested in the capital market.
The stakes to be offloaded, according to the finance ministry’s directive and approved by Hasina, is between 10 per cent and 49 per cent of each SoE, sources said.
However, an assessment report prepared by the Bank and Financial Institution Division last month revealed that only seven state-owned firms complied with the government’s instruction, while the rest 20, despite taking fresh deadlines from the ministry for the purpose, shelved the divestment plan.
Finance officials said the gas companies must divest their stakes to avert actions to be taken against the defiant SoEs after the upcoming national budget.
-With New Age input
