State-owned assets: Satti terms privatisation an act of excess to masses

Ghulam Murtaza Satti, head of Infrastructure Project Development Facility (IPDF), has called for doing away with the privatisation of state-owned assets which he said were being sold out in past regimes at throwaway prices.
"Selling these precious assets at negligible prices is an act of excess being committed towards the people and we should join hands to stop an ill-conceived privatisation of valuable state units," he said in a statement on Tuesday.
Satti said leading international economists and research scholars, including those based at the Harvard School of Business, had publicly decried the concept of privatisation and called for replacing it with the private-public partnership (PPP) model which shared resources and risks between the private and the public partners to achieve a better service delivery and value for money. "The public-private partnerships are also an ideal way of attracting investment much needed by our cash-starved economy," he said.
Ghulam Murtaza Satti cited the example of the sale of Allied Bank of Pakistan for paltry Rs 14 billion when even the bank building located in the Blue Area Islamabad was worth Rs 6-7 billion. "There are many similar examples to suggest that privatisation in Pakistan has only divested the people and the economy of valuable sources of healthy enterprise and productivity beneficial to all," he said, Referring to what he called an ill-planned privatisation of three heritage hotels owned by Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation (PTDC) in Murree, Peshawar and Lahore and the PTDC was yet to be paid an amount of Rs 1.4 billion by the Privatisation Commission from the sale proceeds despite a lapse of 12 years.
Precisely Government can easily be refrained from loss like asset stripping only if in hand choice of PPP is utilised, where ownership remains with the government while all financial burden slopes to the private party, he added. We have instruments of PPP mode like "financial model" according to which the government is given big amount by the private party. He quoted the example of Pakistan Railways with regards to PPP saying that "under the Track Access Policy railways has been bestowed with the considerable amount of Rs 6 billion." While previously Pakistan Railways was incurring a loss approximately of Rs 42 billion.-PR