Tehran, Iran, October 24
By Mehdi Sepahvand –- Trend:
The Iranian Privatization Organization is going to privatize a number of gas stations next week, a top advisor to the organization’s chief executive told Trend October 24.
“This will probably be held next week. And we hope that this changes the figures around the volume of privatization in the country,” Jafar Sobhani said.
Asked about the reasons behind the lower number of companies privatized in the first half of the current Iranian fiscal year (since March 21) compared to the same period last year, Sobhani said no unnatural factor has caused the situation.
Some 1,174 billion rials (about $34 million based on official rate of 34,300 rials per each USD) of Iranian government companies’ shares were sold during the first seven months of the current Iranian fiscal year (started March 20, 2017).
“It is not a precise method to compare a period of a year to the same period of a previous year to judge privatization alterations. Things have to be put together like a puzzle. It is usually so that in the second half of the year the number of privatizations rises,” Sobhani noted.
Iran plans to privatize some 337 state-run companies by March 2018.
“Adding to that is the fact that while we did not have the Justice Shares as one of our areas of activity last year, but this year it has been relegated to us and it lays a great amount of work on us,” Sobhani further explained.
“Also, right now we have some one thousand tenders on the stock market and over the counter market,” he said, hoping that in the coming weeks privatization figures show a significant boost.
In 2007, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei requested that government officials speed up implementation of the policies outlined in the amendment of Article 44 of the Constitution to move towards economic privatization. Khamenei also suggested that ownership rights should be protected in courts set up by the Justice Ministry; the hope was that this new protection would give an additional measure of security and encourage private investment.
Some 80 percent of the companies subject to Article 44 would be transferred to public ownership, 40 percent of which will be conducted through the "Justice Shares" scheme and the rest through the Bourse Organization. The government will keep the title of the remaining 20 percent.
Under Justice Shares plan, the government relegates shares to low-income families, starting with the poorest. Under this plan, millions of Iranian families will receive shares in state-owned firms, the value of which will be reimbursed in 20 years from the dividends generated by those shares.
Since the Privatization Organization was launched in 2001, it has privatized 1,440 trillion rials of governmental shares.
During the last fiscal year (ended March 2017), 49,075 billion rials of government companies’ shares were sold to the private sector.