New privatization strategy pursued

Egyptian Minister of Public Business Sector Mokhtar Khattab said the government has worked out a plan to avoid the negative of the September 11 events on the Egyptian economy.

Addressing a symposium on ways of luring the World Money Market Investments in the Privatization Program, organized by the British Egyptian Businessmen Association (BEBA), Khattab said tourism, transport, privatization as well as foreign investments are the most sectors harmed by the recent attacks on the US.

The government expects a shrink in the volume of foreign investments in purchasing public enterprises companies, the new privatization policy focuses on luring local and regional investments as well as transferring the firms' management to the private sector, Khattab added.

The strategy also provides for dividing the large companies into small financial productive units that suit the investors' abilities, the Minister said.

This besides endorsing a number of incentives for selling 56 companies, including offering tax exemption to the investors, leasing the land in case of any default besides evaluating the companies' equipment according to the book value not the market value, he added.

The new privatization strategy aims at rehabilitating the faltering companies to improve its economic performance and turn these companies into profit-making ones so as to be floated for sale on Stock Exchange or to an anchor investor, Khattab said.

Meanwhile, Khattab recently said that the Egyptian government is enforcing socio-economic policies that take into consideration interests of the low-income brackets and maintain workers' rights.

The government does not resort to closing down under performing economic businesses but endeavors to reform loss making companies, he told a conference in Alexandria.

According to Khattab, the government managed to overcome the economic slowdown and recession in year 2000 by adopting new policies including privatization of public enterprise companies, adding that some 180 companies and factories out of 314 were sold off till last month.

Egypt has pursued successful economic reforms based on privatization and deregulation since the early l990s.