Inside Financial Markets

OGDCL, PPL, UBL privatisation: PC approves negotiations with 3 consortiums

ogdc pplOGDCL, PPL, UBL privatisation: PC approves negotiations with 3 consortiums

ISLAMABAD: Board of Privatisation Commission on (PC) Tuesday unanimously approved to initiate the contract negotiations with three consortiums for divestment of government shareholding in Oil and Gas Development Company Limited (OGDCL), Pakistan Petroleum Limited (PPL) and United Bank Limited (UBL).
PC Board on the basis of the technical and financial scoring approved Merril lynch International, Citigroup global Markets Limited, KASB Bank Limited for OGDCL, Habib Bank limited, Bank Alfallah limited, Arif Habib Limited, Foundation Securities (Pvt) Limited, BMA Capital Management Limited for PPL and consortium of Credit Suisse, Arif Habib Limited and Elixir Securities for UBL as Financial Advisers. The 4th board meeting of the Privatisation Commission was held with Muhammad Zubair Chairman Privatisation Commission in chair. The Board was apprised on the efforts made by the Commission on the execution of the approved privatisation roadmap and was presented with the results of the shortlisted Financial Advisers for the transactions of OGDCL, PPL and UBL for approval.
According to the vision and Road Map of chairman PC privatisation is an important policy tool for generating growth and addressing structural imbalances by removing artificial barriers and opening up the economy to competition. Privatisation programme is part of the economic reforms agenda of the government that along with deregulation, restructuring and good governance seeks to enhance growth and productivity in the economy by harnessing the private sector’s capital and managerial potential as engine of growth and gradually decreasing government’s role to providing level playing field and favourable business climate.
The government will, therefore, systematically come out of the ‘business of running businesses’ and industry through privatisation of public sector enterprises (PSEs) and confining its role to making policy and providing good governance, providing a sound and effective regulatory framework, ensuring social equity and economic justice, providing enabling environment including physical and technical infrastructure and social services.
Currently there are 64 PSEs on the privatisation agenda. The same would be taken up for privatisation on case-to-case basis, after thorough study of their modalities and ground realities, which would involve restructuring, corporatisation etc for improvement of the same.
It is not the government’s duty to run businesses but to monitor/oversee it, through private sector involvement by harnessing the true potential of the entities and to deliver state of the art facilities to the general public, which in turn improve their life style.
Government’s privatisation programme is flexible and keeps adjusting according to ground realities while keeping the overall direction intact.
The privatisation has been helpful in liberating the government from micro-management of the economy. Privatisation cannot be accomplished in a vacuum without the support of all the stakeholders including various government agencies, departments and organisations and most importantly the people of Pakistan. Government is also encouraging the general public to participate in the privatisation process through the capital market (via Public Offerings) under the ‘Privatisation for the People’ programme.
PC has been supporting the government to establish regulatory regimes for various sectors. So far independent regulatory authorities have been established for telecommunication, electricity, electronic media, oil and gas etc. In addition the State Bank of Pakistan and the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan has been made independent and the Competition Commission of Pakistan has been revamped.
Since inception the PC has completed 167 transactions for Rs 476.421 billion ($9.0 billion approx). During this phase, the PC completed some big capital market transactions (about 27% of total proceeds) apart from asset/ strategic sales like (about 73% of total proceeds).

Sanie Khan

Sanie Khan holds a deep knowledge of the financial markets in Pakistan. Based in Karachi, he has over 20 years of hands-on management experience in financial technologies and managing operations in the financial sector. He was the General Manager at the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) for 17 years. He along-with senior members of Exchange

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